Over the past couple of weeks, ERC have been busy in the Maldives working with Cefas and our in country partner, the Small Island Geographical Society (SIGS), to set up the work on Abandoned, Lost and otherwise Discarded Fishing Gear.  Funded by the Blue Planet Fund, Ocean Country Partnership Programme, the work will access different data streams including a fisher survey which we piloted this week in Hammafushi. This provides a fisher perspective on the issue and allows us to compare regionally with other countries in which the work has been carried out in, including most recently in Sri Lanka.

Training was also carried out this week into beach litter monitoring using the OSPAR approach with known coastal accumulations being targeted over the duration of the project to compare with data collected elsewhere.  

With other secondary sources also being identified, the data collection phase of the work is now ready to go and we are looking forward to reporting on this over the next 12 months.