Emergency Response: Tackling a Plastic ocean

Dear Supporters,

Have you heard about the Plastic Ocean or the issues we face due to pollution in the ocean? You might think of course, hasn’t everybody? Well actually no… You are one of the lucky ones with access to education and awareness but millions of people that live under their national poverty lines, often near an ocean, are uneducated and unaware of the issues we face. Today we face 5 major threats to our ocean and the only way we will win the race of prevention is by educating and working together. 

These 5 major threats are: 

1. Pollution everywhere! 
2. Depleted fish stocks (in 2015 81 million tons of fish and seafood was taken from the ocean)
3. Ocean Acidification, this is when CO2 dissolves into the water it increases ocean acidity
4. A Warmer world, the ocean absorbs more than 93% of heat generated from man made CO2 emissions 
5. Buried treasure - Research shows that such metallic nodule fields are in fact the hotspots of biodiversity 

This is a new project for us but the work we are supporting has been carried out for a while with a proven track record. With your donation we are funding a number of activities globally from beach cleans, environmental public talks and events, funding the cost of the diving equipment needed for our teams to get below the ocean to help collect vital research and monitoring. Alongside this we also run youth engagement projects for example our Citizen Science Youth Program in South Africa and Snorkelling educational tours for young people. 

Your donations will be used to purchase snorkels and workshops to engage young people as well as fund the costs of refuse removal for our beach, ocean and river community cleans. Larger donations also fund our dive equipment and research stations to help us collect raw data to ensure we protect and fund innovative methods to help us protect the survival of all ocean wildlife and corals. 

As this is a new project we have been focused mainly on beach cleans while we begin our fundraising for this project to expand in the future and your donations will be directed to our youth engagement projects over the next three months. 

If you would like to find out more about our project please do reach out to us at hello@gvitrust.org