Carolyn Caporusso

Carolyn Caporusso is the Coordinator of Clean Coast Bonaire, a volunteer-based marine litter monitoring program on the island of Bonaire, in the Caribbean Netherlands. Clean Coast Bonaire is a WWF-NL funded project that utilizes the OSPAR Beach Litter Monitoring Protocol. An experienced educator and environmental advocate, her professional achievements include international coordination of environmental insurance litigation, development of educational programs for scuba instructors, tourism sector management, coordination of large-scale citizen science underwater clean-ups and beach clean-ups, and awareness raising action as a founding member of A Plastic Free Bonaire. In her capacity as a Program Advisor for the WWF-NL Dutch Caribbean Program, she conducted stakeholder outreach and provided advice for the development of Bonaire’s Single Use Plastic Ban. She is the co-author of the reports “Harmonization of Marine Litter Monitoring in the Wider Caribbean Region: A Hybrid Approach” and “Action Plan for Harmonization of Marine Litter Monitoring in the Wider Caribbean Region.” The reports were produced for the United Nations Caribbean Environment Program to define an effective regional strategy for networking and create a roadmap for a cost-effective, robust, and easily replicable means to collect high quality, harmonized data that is aligned with global marine litter data consolidation and analysis.

Presentation outline:

• Clean Coast Bonaire project overview
• Importance of monitoring
• OSPAR methodology
• Use of data
  • Awareness raising
  • Government advocacy
  • Litter reduction strategies
  • Baseline data to determine effectiveness of reduction interventions
• Single Use Plastic Ban in Bonaire
  • Planning & preparation
  • Stakeholder involvement
  • Items chosen
  • Challenges
  • Alternatives
    • Greenwashing of bioplastics
    • Importance of reusables
  • Results
• Conclusions
  • Social justice
  • Global, regional, local cooperationneeded
  • Capacity building and sharing of best practices

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