The International Pole and Line Foundation has partnered with the Olive Ridley Project to collect and upcycle ghost gear, funded by the inaugural Joanna Toole Ghost Gear Solutions Award.
This project is aimed at incentivising Maldivian fishermen to collect ghost nets they encounter while at sea. At the moment, the project is ready to be piloted by the local one-by-one tuna catching sector working off Gemanafushi Island, in the southern region of the Maldives.
Crucially, the Island Council also agreed to provide their full support in helping to arrange the transport of nets landed on the island and to identify an appropriate storage facility for collected ghost nets.
With encountered nets often weighing more than 80kg, the fishermen in the programme will be reclaiming fishing gear that is potentially more than 4000 times the weight of the fishing lines being used in the Maldives.
Taking into consideration the loss rates and the weight of gear used by pole-and-line vessels in the Maldives, it would take approximately 1000 fishing trips for enough lost lines to equate to the weight of just one of the larger ghost nets typically encountered.
Through retrieving these abandoned fishing nets, the Maldives one-by-one fishery aims to become the world's first fishery to demonstrate that it removes more ghost gear by weight from the ocean than is lost through its own fishing operations.
