GGGI 2023 JOANNA TOOLE SOLUTIONS AWARDEES
The 2023 Joanna Toole Solutions Award recipients have been announced! Historically, there has only been one winner selected each year but, this year, with generous funding from the Joanna Toole Foundation and the government of Norway, for the first time, the Global Ghost Gear Initiative is funding three separate organizations for the 2023 Joanna Toole Awards. This year’s winners are Ocean Legacy Foundation, Surfrider Foundation Kaua’i Chapter, and Tangaroa Blue Foundation.
The Joanna Toole Ghost Gear Solutions Award was created and first announced on World Oceans Day in 2019 to honor the tragic passing of GGGI co-founder, United Nations worker, and former World Animal Protection campaigner, Joanna (Jo) Toole, 36, whose life was tragically taken in the Ethiopian airlines crash in March 2019.
In honor of Joanna’s legacy, the Joanna Toole Ghost Gear Solutions Award has been awarded annually since 2019 to ghost gear projects that focus on positive animal impacts and female leadership in the ghost gear space. We received numerous applications again this year, and after a thorough round of review from the Joanna Toole Foundation and the GGGI, we are delighted to support these three outstanding projects. More details on each project can be found below; all are comprehensive applications.
2023 Project Awardees
OCEAN LEGACY FOUNDATION
Ocean Plastic Depot Development
Over the last five years, the Ocean Legacy Foundation has successfully established four Ocean Plastic Depots (OPDs) across British Columbia, Canada, and has developed a Plastic Pollution Emergency Response Facility in Richmond, just south of Vancouver, British Columbia. This endeavor represents one of the largest marine debris collection and recycling networks in the country and engages a variety of regional and local community partners, marine industry stakeholders, as well as local Indigenous groups. This project is building on the ongoing work of Ocean Legacy in the development of a provincial strategy around the responsible recycling and end-of-life management of marine debris and ALDFG materials.
SURFRIDER FOUNDATION - KAUAI CHAPTER
North Pacific Eel Trap Project
The Kauai Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation has been working to collect, record, and map eel-related ALDFG from the Hawaiian Islands since 2021 – in addition to the ongoing community beach cleanups and targeted net patrols that have been taking place for more than fifteen years. Since the inception of the eel research program, Surfrider Kauai has collected more than 10,000 eel trap entrances (ETEs) from the shores of the Hawaiian Islands, documenting digital images to be used in AI computer-based image analysis, and hand-identifying 137 individual models of ETEs that can be traced to manufacturers in Asia. This targeted North Pacific Eel Trap Project will engage with researchers, manufacturers, and communities to address the issues of eel-related ALDFG and the impacts on the environment and mortality of marine mammals.
TANGAROA BLUE FOUNDATION
Project ReCon
In an Australian first, Project ReCon was launched in December 2022 along the Great Barrier Reef to provide communities with a way of contributing to an ALDFG recovery, repair, reuse, and recycling project. Through the GGGI Small Grants Program, Tangaroa Blue will expand and extend Project ReCon to enable participation of additional communities along the Great Barrier Reef, the Torres Strait Islands, and the Gulf of Carpentaria. The project will focus on collecting discarded GPS fishing buoys during cleanup events, repurposing those buoys to track nets and other ALDFG, and monitoring ALDFG until recovery operations can take place.
From the Joanna Toole Foundation
"We are proud to remain associated with the GGGI and pleased to be able to sup-port the Joanna Toole Ghost Gear Solutions Award financially. I am sure that these three awardees will achieve great things in their respective lo-cations and have our full support as well as that of Joanna herself. It is noteworthy that female leadership is much in evidence in these awards and although Jo was willing and able to work effectively with all the experts in her field, she was always pleased to involve women."
- Adrian Toole Jo's father and the Joanna Toole Foundation's Chair of Trustees
