What is a Ghost Net?
Ghost nets are fishing nets that have been lost accidentally, deliberately discarded, or simply abandoned at sea. They travel the oceans of the world with the currents and tides continually fishing as they progress through the waters. As they are unattended and roaming, they fish indiscriminately, not only catching threatened species but undersized and protected fish as well.
What is the Carpentaria Ghost Net Programme?
Northern Australia supports an array of marine and coastal species including six of the worlds seven marine turtle species and four sawfish species, many of whose populations have declined elsewhere. Ghostnets are part of vast rafts of marine debris arriving from SE Asia that are fouling this otherwise pristine coastline, mostly owned and occupied by Indigenous peoples of Australia.
The Carpentaria Ghost Nets Programme, an alliance of the 18 indigenous communities surrounding the Gulf of Carpentaria, was established in 2004. In the following four years the project achieved the removal of 5,243 ghost nets of varying sizes from approximately 1500km of coastline. This has resulted in recovery of a proportion of the trapped wildlife, particularly marine turtles (52%), and the prevention of the ghost nets from returning to the sea, continuing their destructing life-cycle. Less than 10% of these nets have been attributed to Australian fisheries.
This project is also enabling these Aboriginal communities to fulfil their aspirations to care for their sea country through building the skills and knowledge of the extensive network of indigenous rangers. It is assisting in the establishment of institutional frameworks and opening channels of communication between these communities on a scale that has never been experienced in Australia with a single project.
The programme has now expanded to include the coastline from the Torres Straits to the Kimberley region in NW Australia (click here to view the map) This expansion recognises that the problem is not confined to the Gulf of Carpentaria as first thought.
This multi award winning programme is managed by the Northern Gulf Resource Management Group (NGRMG) with funding from the Australian Government until 2013. The Australian Government funding is matched by stakeholder's cash and in-kind contributions.
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