Sustainable Coastlines: Love Your Coast and Litter Intelligence
Love Your Coast inspires people to care for the marine environment through education and beach clean-ups. Litter Intelligence aims to inform better decisions for a world without litter. Citizen scientists from communities businesses and schools are trained to monitor their local beach, providing open access data to improve decision-making to solve litter problems.
Background
Litter is a major risk to Aotearoa’s people, culture, environment and economy, especially in the marine environment. New Zealanders are the 10th worst producers of urban waste in the world. The country lacks reliable and standardised litter data to inform better decision-making. Communities lack the capability, opportunity and motivation for environmental monitoring and reporting.
Sustainable Coastlines connects people to nature and inspires change. Its vision is beautiful beaches / oneone korekoreko, healthy waters / waiora, and inspired people / tangata whakaohooho who protect the places they love.
They coordinate and support large-scale coastal clean-up events, riparian planting and restoration activities, education programmes, public awareness campaigns, and training workshops.
Project details
The goal is to develop community capacity with tools people can use to address these challenges. Sustainable Coastlines partners with local communities, mana whenua, schools and businesses to identify, monitor and remedy negative environmental impacts on coastal ecosystems and waterways.
Love Your Coast combines large-scale beach clean-ups with an education programme to help prevent litter and reduce the consumption of single use plastics. Litter Intelligence is Aotearoa’s only national litter monitoring programme. It was developed in collaboration with Statistics New Zealand, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), and the Department of Conservation. Funding comes from the Ministry for the Environment.
The group offers free access to data and insights from quarterly litter surveys at 210 sites across Aotearoa / New Zealand.
What they hope to achieve
Sustainable Coastlines wants to help New Zealanders look after their coastlines and waterways. The goal is to develop capacity within communities by creating and proving tools that address litter challenges.
Citizen science opportunities
Sustainable Coastlines works directly and inclusively with communities around Aotearoa / New Zealand. They rely on public support through volunteering, donations litter collection and monitoring. They work with local government, mana whenua, and community groups and businesses. They supports over 10,000 citizen scientists to run the quarterly litter surveys. This data can be viewed at Litter Intelligence.
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