Cleaner Seas: Reducing Marine Pollution

In the age of the Anthropocene, the Ocean have typically been viewed as a sink for our pollution. Pollution is varied, ranging from human-made plastics and pharmaceutical compounds, to human-altered abiotic factors, such as sediment and nutrient runoff.

As the global population, wealth and resource consumption continues to grow, so too does the amount of pollution we produce. This presents us with a grand challenge which requires interdisciplinary knowledge to solve. While there is sufficient data on the human health, social economic, and environmental risks of marine pollution, a significant lag exists when implementing strategies to address this issue.

We gathered 17 experts from the fields of social sciences, marine science, visual arts, logistics and traditional and first nations knowledge holders to present two futures; the Business-as-usual, based on current trends and observations of growing marine pollution, and a More Sustainable Future, which imagines what our Ocean could look like if we implemented current knowledge and technologies.

We identified priority actions that governments, industry and consumers can implement at pollution sources, vectors and sinks, over the next decade to reduce marine pollution and steer us towards the More Sustainable Future.