Pollution

Overview of the Solutions Landscape

Ocean pollution can come from both land and sea; this chapter focuses primarily on land-based sources of ocean and coastal pollution. Pollution—in the form of chemicals, pathogens, nutrients, and physical waste—comes from almost all human activities. It can come from cities that discharge directly into the ocean through sewer outflows, poorly designed landfills, and direct trash dumps or from stormwater runoff that washes pollutants into waterways and eventually into the ocean; from farms where rain and irrigation causes the pesticides, fertilizers, and plastic used to grow crops to run off or be disposed of unsafely; from the effluents, toxic chemicals, and physical wastes discharged from factories (into the water) and from fossil fuels and chemicals that are burned and spewed into the atmosphere, traveling long distances until they deposit in the ocean; and from ocean-based industries like aquaculture, shipping, oil and gas production, cruise travel and ferries. “The ocean is the ultimate sink for anthropogenic pollution,” said the High Level Panel for Ocean Sustainability in 2019.¹

When thinking about solutions to ocean pollution, it is helpful to try to answer four key questions in sequence:

• What is the harm being caused?
• How is pollution causing harm? (e.g., from what source, and via what mechanism)
• Who is responsible?
• What can (or should) they do about it?

Identifying what pollutants are entering the ocean environment, and what harm they are causing, is the foundation of action to address ocean pollution. Basic research and monitoring is required to understand the impacts that land-based pollutants—whether that be sewage from our cities, plastic from trash, or fertilizers and pesticides from agriculture—are having on ocean and coastal ecosystems. Impacts can vary depending on ecosystem type (e.g., a salt marsh versus. the open ocean) and a whole host of biological, ecological, and human demography factors. For this reason, place-specific research is often required to understand the unique ways in which pollutants travel from source and ultimately where they are causing impacts to the environment and human life. While there is a strong base of research on the impacts of some pollutants and in some places (e.g., the impacts of excess fertilizer use on the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone), some pollutants are not studied at all, and there is very little understanding of what is entering the ocean and what harm it is causing (including for microplastics and microfibers). This is where efforts like investments in oceanographic research, new sensing technologies, and citizen science efforts to collect water quality data can be critical.

Laws, policies, regulations, and standards—from local to national and international levels—set out the requirements to prevent, manage, or clean up ocean pollution. Most laws to protect water quality exist at the national level, which, depending on the governance framework, may be passed down to more distributed local government levels. Examples of these laws and frameworks include the Clean Water Act in the United States and the EU Water Framework Directives. According to UN Environment, water quality, waste management, nature and biodiversity, air quality, and noise are all major gaps in environmental law implementation globally—this in spite of the fact that 176 countries have environmental framework laws or other mechanisms to consider the environment in development.² These laws are plagued by weak enforcement, unclear standards, no legal mandates, a lack of tailoring to local conditions, and implementing ministries that are under-funded or politically weak. In places where these frameworks are weak or poorly enforced, awareness raising activities such as campaigns for plastic bans or to fix persistent sewage leaks can help create the impetus for enforcement and funding. Voluntary standards, like many state-level Water Quality Standards in the US, are largely seen to be ineffective in driving improvements in pollution outcomes.³ Some international and regional standards and guidelines exist—such as the Cartagena Convention for the Caribbean and the World Health Organization’s Recreational Water Quality guidelines—but there is no global framework or treaty requiring states to manage land-based sources of ocean pollution, leaving a critical gap in management and enforcement.

Monitoring and enforcing these frameworks is a major area of government and civil society action. In places where water quality laws exist that apply to coastal and marine areas, ensuring appropriate monitoring of conditions, reporting of discharges, and enforcement in situations of non-compliance are a key focus of government and civil society. For example, in the US, water quality at beaches is monitored in a patchwork fashion by the BEACH Act, and water quality is selectively sampled by the Environmental Protection Agency.⁴ When polluters are found to be out of compliance with permits, they can be sued by organizations like Earthjustice, Waterkeeper Alliance, Surfrider Foundation and other NGOs that seek to ensure good coastal water quality. Water quality trading programs are considered an efficient economic tool to help achieve pollution reductions at the least cost. Many of these same organizations pursue broader strategic litigation to shape environmental laws, and also involve local communities in monitoring and clean-up activities, such as via Surfrider Foundation’s Blue Water Task Force. Consumer advocacy and protection groups, like the Environmental Working Group, often focus on the harm caused by pollutants and share information to inform consumer activism.

Once it is clear that harm is being caused and that a polluter is responsible (which could be an individual, municipality, or even a whole sector of the economy), addressing pollution requires a broad set of interventions: prevention, better waste management (disposal, collection, transportation, treatment, discharge), removal and remediation. Preventing pollution in the first place—through strict laws on what can and cannot be discharged, the development of new eco-friendly materials, and re-use of “waste” streams for irrigation, energy, and even drinking water—are likely the most cost-effective solutions for ocean health. Once waste has been created, however, waste management infrastructure for solid and liquid waste can be highly effective in reducing the pollutant load by intercepting waste streams and reducing their toxicity or converting them to alternate uses, such as re-use in agriculture, energy, drinking water, or even new products. Infrastructure can be very costly to build and maintain, with the gap in investment for plastic waste management infrastructure alone at several hundred billion dollars by 2050. Nature-based solutions such as constructed wetlands  that can serve dual functions of waste management and provide ecological benefits are increasingly being promulgated.⁵ Once waste is in the marine environment, in all likelihood it will stay there in some form. Toxic chemicals like mercury can bioaccumulate in fish, and plastics can take decades to degrade. Clean-up efforts are likely too costly to operate effectively at scale. Behavioral incentives to reduce consumption and ensure proper disposal can be important and effective locally, but focus on individual responsibility can overshadow the critical role and responsibility of key polluting cities, industries, and enterprises. NGOs aim to be strategic with their pollution investments, as a landmark study identified five countries in South and Southeast Asia as key to solving plastic leakage into the ocean, with the potential to reduce plastic pollution into the ocean by as much as 50 percent.⁶

Solutions to ocean pollution face a fundamental barrier: the belief that the ocean is the ultimate dumping ground for society’s wastes. New narratives are needed to re-think waste on a planet of finite resources. Thought leadership by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation on the topic of a circular economy has gained traction in recent years as a way to re-envision what an economy might look like if we decouple resource use and consumption from economic growth. While this idea has received the most traction in the world of plastics pollution by groups like The Circulate Initiative and the Ocean Conservancy, it can be relevant across all sectors of society that follow a linear growth model where resources are depleted and disposed, versus re-used. Green chemistry and alternative materials seem to be an emerging area of innovation with promise for reducing some of the most hazardous sources of ocean pollution.

Reducing pollution comes with substantial co-benefits – for health, sustainable development, well-being, and gender equity. Aside from the benefits for coastal and marine ecosystems, mitigating pollution can reduce human exposure to pathogens and toxic chemicals (such as infectious waterborne diseases like cholera or mercury contamination through seafood ingestion) that causes respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases, cancer, acute toxicity, and reproductive, endocrine, neurological, immunological, and behavioral adverse health effects.⁷ Re-using waste for agricultural, irrigation, energy, and even drinking water can help address water scarcity issues in arid parts of the world, and help countries achieve economic growth goals while using less.⁸ Reductions in dead zones and algal blooms can affect fisheries productivity and tourism, while providing access to sanitation can support gender equity by keeping girls in schools and reducing risk of sexual assault. Moreover, taking action on pollution is politically popular. Of the environmental threats tracked by Gallup, pollution of rivers, lakes and reservoirs shows the second highest level of concern among respondents. These levels of concern are less than drinking water, but more than climate change—and are at their highest levels since 2001.

Potential Solution Areas That Are Underexplored or Understudied

The following areas are considered underexplored or understudied in the ocean pollution sector:

• Systematic pollution control efforts tend to be limited outside of the United States and European Union. A recent assessment found very little coastal water quality monitoring and enforcement in countries like Fiji, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Honduras. There is also a significant need for waste management solutions that make sense for rapidly urbanizing cities in the Global South, such as decentralized wastewater treatment and solid waste management solutions that do not further exacerbate air pollution and other environmental inequities.
• Financing for waste and wastewater management solutions does not match the scale of required infrastructure. There is a massive gap between the infrastructure required to reduce ocean pollution and the dollars available. Creative financing mechanisms are needed to overcome this barrier, particularly in lower-income countries already constrained by high debt burdens.
• Technology solutions for nutrient reduction and toxic chemical control are outpaced by current levels of chemical production. The pace of new chemical production far exceeds our capacity to monitor, assess impacts, and regulate them. As pollution control is a regulatory-driven market, new initiatives are needed to spur innovation and overcome the lack of incentives for technology development.

Knowledge Gaps and Outstanding Questions for the Field

The following areas represent knowledge gaps and/or outstanding questions around ocean pollution:

• What are the equity and justice implications of ocean pollution? Who is affected most by pollution of the ocean, and what are the implications for equity in terms of where solutions are needed most?
• How can conservation practitioners, policymakers, and other stakeholders bring behavioral insights and human-centered design into their toolkit to accelerate culturally-appropriate solutions for sewage pollution? Effective behavioral campaigns rooted in behavioral science can be important complements to regulation and can help facilitate enforcement. Initiatives such as Rare’s Solutions Search are beginning to explore effective strategies to shift behaviors on a large scale, beyond regulations and tax incentives.

Emerging Areas of Interest and Research

The following areas represent emerging areas of interest and research on ocean pollution:

• Can the concept of a circular economy provide a model for transitioning to a regenerative economy that builds long-term resilience for people and planet? An idea, promulgated by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and many others, that we can build an economy that redefines growth from being a linear process where more growth equates to more waste, and towards a circular model where economic activity is decoupled from the use of resources. The circular economy concept is based on the premise that there is no such thing as waste; there is nowhere for pollution to go in a closed system, including the ocean. The concept focuses on four building blocks: design, new business models, reverse cycles, and enabling conditions. It encompasses many schools of thought such as industrial ecology, cradle to cradle design philosophy, the performance economy, and natural capital.

Typology