Adopt A Beach
Adopt a Beach is an initiative under UNEP where groups of citizens volunteer to ‘adopt’ a beach and record quantities and types of plastic pollution on their designated beach around Greece, the west coast of Turkey and south Albania.
In order to join the programme, group leaders must simply create an adoption group, register for the programme and ‘adopt’ a beach. Adopting a beach involves selecting a specific beach to clean up, recording the marine litter encountered along the way (at least twice a year). Adopt a Beach provides tutorials via webinars and some live seminars as well as toolkits in order to facilitate the data collection.
The results are then added onto the database, which is in the form of an interactive map. The teams are also featured on the website, which states the number of beaches adopted and the number of submissions.
WWF Greece, HCMR Greece, Scouts of Greece partnered to create this programme with the aim to raise awareness regarding the issue of plastic pollution and to mobilise the population, to create a database to inform public authorities of the source of marine litter on beaches and, of course, to mitigate pollution levels through either policy measures, local interventions and/or beach clean-up initiatives.
