2025 February – 3-year Report EASICO – The East Asian Seas Initiative on Clean Oceans (EASICO) was established in 2021 to combat marine plastic pollution in East Asia, with the goal of achieving zero plastics in the region’s seas by 2030. Funded by the Korean Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, EASICO has fostered regional cooperation by implementing capacity-building workshops, citizen science programs (CSP), and community participation programs (CPP). Over the past three years, these efforts have strengthened partnerships and advanced sustainable waste management strategies.
Full report on Capacity Building Workshops, Citizen Science Program (CSP) and Community Participation Program (CPP)
Citizen science plays a key role in data collection on the presence and pathways of litter in the environment, on land, rivers, lakes and the ocean. Citizen science — active public involvement in scientific research — is advancing; there is a growing stakeholder network of civil society organisations and marine scientists collaborating on professionalising citizen science. Citizen science contributes to expanding data collection to a wider geographical area. Based on data analysis campaigns can be developed to address specific types of litter found in the monitored area, which contributes to advancing applied science. Citizens engaging in litter clean-ups do not necessarily have the knowledge about scientific methods, monitoring protocols, data analysis and reporting and is met by scepticism by some. Collaboration between citizens and scientists is key.
Our monitoring team at Indonesian Waste Platform engaged in a collaborative program with OSEAN since 2019. We follow the method developed by OSEAN and regularly edit our monitoring data in the shared datafile.
Capacity building workshop June 2022
Capacity building Workshop 30 April – 1 May 2022
Capacity building & public awareness. A 2-day Citizen Science workshop was held on 30 April (theory) and 1 May (fieldwork) 2022 by IWP in collaboration with OSEAN, PEMSEA, Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries of Republic of Korea.
Capacity building Workshop 2019
One example of such cross-sector collaboration is the Labuan Bajo monitoring program. Since 2021 the Ministry of Fisheries of Republic of Korea and Korea Marine Environment Management Corporation supports O.S.E.A.N and Indonesian Waste Platform (IWP) on developing a comprehensive citizen science program, which includes training on monitoring protocol and data logging.
An initial workshop was conducted by O.S.E.A.N in October 2019 in Labuan Bajo, on Flores island in East Indonesia. In October 2021 IWP team conducted a second monitoring in the same 5 locations with guidance from OSEAN team. Report will be published in December 2021.
Publication
Asia Pacific Civil Forum on Marine Litter – Marine Litter News – Volume 13 · Issue 2 · December 2021 – The Important Role of Citizen Science to Combat Marine Litter and Ways It Can Transform Research
Citizen science in the field
Campaign development
We developed campaign materials for socialisation about the need to reduce single-use plastics, based on the data we collected in our citizen program. One campaign addresses single-use plastic used in subsistence fisheries .
