Youna Lyons, Cheng Ling Lim and Yulu Liu from CIL Ocean Law and Policy Programme were invited by the Coordinating Body on the Seas of East Asia (COBSEA) to present the Regional Marine Plastic Research Inventory they coordinated. This regional consultation was organised on 20 April 2022 via Zoom by COBSEA as part of the project ‘Reducing marine litter by addressing the management of the plastic value chain in South-East Asia’ (SEA circular). COBSEA member States, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, RO Korea, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam participated to the consultation.

At the Workshop, Youna, Cheng Ling and Yulu presented the new regional research inventory (RRI 2.0) and the online data visualisation platform. It is the first of its kind in the region and includes 702 science and humanities publications on different aspects of pollution from marine plastics in ASEAN + 3 region. The publications collected for the inventory and the data extraction were realised with the support of a region-wide team without whom the work could not have been done. In addition to relevant publications in English, the regional team was able to include publications in Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean. An online interactive data visualisation platform was also created to facilitate data accessibility by relevant stakeholders (including regional scholars and policy-makers) on different research topics, including sources and pathways of marine plastics, pollution hotspots and microplastics. This online data platform was also presented in the consultation and regional stakeholders were invited to provide feedback prior to official release of the database and platform. The presentation slides are available here 20April COBSEA – NUS Project Presentation.