IPNLF will be launching a new initiative aimed at incentivizing
coastal fisheries to collect and upcycle lost and abandoned ghost nets they
encounter whilst fishing. This project is funded by the Joanna Toole
Ghost Gear Solutions Award.
The International Pole & Line Foundation (IPNLF) announced
this initiative as the first ever recipients of World Animal Protections Joanna
Toole Ghost Gear Solutions Award. In
partnership with the Olive Ridley Project, this project is aimed at incentivizing
Maldivian fishers to collect ghost nets they encounter during their fishing
operations. As a result, the Maldivian fishing industry is primed to remove
foreign ghost nets at-sea. At the moment, the project is ready to be piloted by
the local one-by-one tuna catching sector working off Gemanafushi Island, in
the southern region of the Maldives.
Around 640,000 tonnes of fishing gear is estimated to be
lost or abandoned in the worlds seas annually. In the Maldives,
facilitating the removal of ghost nets has become an essential action due to the rapidly
accumulating volumes of fishing nets that are drifting into the nations waters
after being abandoned, lost or discarded from elsewhere in the Indian Ocean,
causing destruction to fragile local marine habitats and megafauna.
To tackle this important issue in the Maldives, IPNLF teams up
with the Olive Ridley Project who brought a wealth of experience to the project
in terms of the removal of ghost gear in the Maldives, having already removed
1,340 nets from inshore areas since 2015. IPNLF aims to utilize its close
relationship with one-by-one tuna fisheries together with the Olive Ridley
Projects past experience, building upon the ghost net removal work that has
already been achieved by initiating ghost net collection out at sea.
Through successful at-sea net collection efforts, the ghost
fishing cycle of nets will be drastically curtailed in comparison to collecting
beached nets, thus increasing the likelihood of survival of entangled Olive
Ridley turtles and other affected animals that are listed as Endangered,
Threatened, and Protected.
The fishers in the programme will be reclaiming fishing gear
that is potentially more than 4000 times the weight of the fishing lines being
used in the Maldives. It would take approximately 1000 fishing trips for enough
fishing lines to be lost to equate to the weight of just one of the larger
ghost nets typically encountered by fishers. Through retrieving these abandoned
fishing nets, the Maldives one-by-one fishery aims to become the world's first
fishery to evidence that removes more ghost gear by weight from the ocean
than is lost through its own fishing operations.
IPNLF conducted the first
outreach trip to the pilot site of Gemanafushi during the final week of
February 2020. The project was officially introduced to all stakeholders,
discussing the logistics of ghost net collection/storage and finally outlining
the need for a circular economy distribution system to re-purpose the collected
nets locally. These initial meetings were extremely successful with all
affiliated fishers agreeing to the ghost net collection protocol and safety
measures developed by project manager Zacari Edwards, and the local Womens
Development Committee declaring an interest in coordinating the circular
economy distribution system.
Speaking on the impact of the award, IPNLF Socio Economic Manager and co-coordinator of the Global Ghost Gear Initiatives Building Evidence Working Group, Zacari Edwards, said, "The Joanna Toole Ghost Gear Solutions Award Grant has been critical in providing both the impetus and enabling conditions for Maldivian fishers to tackle the issue of foreign ghost nets themselves. We are ambitious that there is a high potential for the approach of this project to be replicated and introduced in many other fisheries throughout the world. Therefore, we are also hopeful that this project can evidence a replicable model for how the industry can demonstrate they are having a positive impact on the amount of ghost gear entering the ocean, hopefully moving the sector away from pledges and commitments that are difficult to verify toward more tangible actions".
Most importantly, the Island Council also agreed to provide their full support in helping to arrange the transportation of nets landed on the island and to identify an appropriate storage facility for collected ghost nets. This approach would also see the integration of the pre-existing local waste management system run by the council with logistical aspects of the project, with workers in the sector collecting and transporting nets landed by fishers from the port to the storage facility. As a result of all the important progress made during this scoping trip, IPNLF now anticipate that the first ghost nets will be landed by fishers as a result of the project in April 2020.
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