Marine Plastics and Coastal Communities

IUCN implements the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida)-funded Marine Plastics and Coastal Communities (MARPLASTICCs) project in five countries: Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Thailand and Vietnam. The project started in late 2017 and runs until end 2020. The higher-order goal of this initiative is that governments, regional bodies, industries and society within the Eastern and Southern Africa and the Asia Pacific regions promote, enact and enforce legislation and other effective measures that contain and reduce marine plastic pollution. The project aims to contribute to impact by focusing on four main pathways to impact: Knowledge, Capacity, Policy, and Business.

Through action via four interconnected pillars, the MARPLASTICCs is delivering the following:

• Tools to assess national plastic leakage into the environment from source-to-sea;
• Actionable, credible, salient and legitimate data and analysis on current plastic leakage status, to inform targets, interventions and development of policy and related instruments (KEN, MOZ, TZ, RSA);
• Plastic circular economy actions to generate critical lessons on enablers for replication and scaling up (KEN, MOZ, RSA);
• Policy and legislative analysis to support legislative and policy reform to reduce plastic leakages (KEN, MOZ, RSA); and
• Private sector plastic footprinting tools to measure plastic wastage and leakage along company value chains (KEN, MOZ, RSA).