Monitoring Approaches for Marine Litter in the European Sea Basins

This chapter describes the monitoring approaches used by marine environmental management frameworks for the assessment of plastic pollution in the European sea basins: Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea, Baltic Sea and the North-East Atlantic region including the North Sea. We review the current developments in the implementation of monitoring elements under the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the four related Regional Sea Conventions: OSPAR Commission, HELCOM, Black Sea Commission and UNEP/MAP Barcelona Convention. The analysis of the existing monitoring approaches reveals strong commitments to providing common monitoring elements for the assessment of marine litter across the different management frameworks and, consequently, between neighbouring countries. Although these monitoring approaches rely mostly on a series of common monitoring elements, the implementation of such approaches is recent and remains subject to relevant knowledge and data gaps. Nevertheless, interaction and coordination among management frameworks will provide substantial improvements to achieving coherent and comparable assessments for marine litter and plastic pollution across Europe in the coming years. The process of developing and implementing monitoring approaches at the European scale through international cooperation is an excellent source of knowledge and experience for the scientific community and policy-makers on a global scale.