A Virtual Center for the Community Addressing the Challenge of Marine Debris

Marine debris poses a growing threat to the marine biosphere and, through contamination of marine food sources, also to human health. Many efforts are under way to monitor, manage, and understand the impacts of marine debris, but the many stakeholders are not well connected. While there are efforts to connect the diverse stakeholders better and to ensure that Earth observation-based information is available to social actors engaged in tackling the problem of marine debris, there is little progress toward a well connected community collaborating across sectoral boundaries. There is a lack of communication between scientists, businesses, governmental organizations, and non-profit organizations and the citizens they want to have a dialog with. The knowledge of the broad public concerning the threat marine debris poses to the marine biosphere and humanity remains at low levels. The existing social media do not provide sufficient community-focused means to facilitate the building of an open cross-sectoral community that could improve collaboration and communication between all stakeholders in marine debris. The pilot Marine Debris Virtual Community Center (MD-VCC) provides a space where stakeholders can learn about the many different origins of marine debris and the pathways of debris entering to marine environment. This space provides opportunities to the people to develop the skills to participate in the dialog about marine debris and ways to tackle this problem. The MD-VCC is created to improve communication and participation related to marine debris. The MD-VCC has the goal to enable a dialog between citizens, businesses, governmental organizations and non-profit organizations about marine debris and means to reduce the influx of marine debris in the ocean.