Fiji Hub - Caqalai Achievement Report

January 2017
Objective: Marine Protection

Perfecting Paradise: Fighting Marine Pollution in Fiji

Our objectives include:

Protection and Monitoring
Facilitate environmental best practice
Education
Increase environmental awareness of volunteers joining Caqalai Base

Global Vision International (GVI) believes in not only reducing its contribution to pollution but also to remove as much
existing marine debris from Caqalai and surrounding areas as possible.

Due to the geographical location of Caqalai and our surrounding house reef, waste from
neighbouring Islands such as Moturiki and Ovalau as well as the rest of the South Pacific often find
their way onto our beaches and become entangled amongst the coral. Discarded plastic, fishing gear
and rusty metal are common place during walks and dives and have their obvious detrimental
effects upon the local ecosystem. We believe that one of the causes of this issue is a lack of
awareness amongst the local towns about how much impact they can individually have upon the
ocean. Our volunteers deliver lessons focussing on environmental issues and best practices, ranging
from local issues such as waste management to global climate change.

GVI Volunteer Kate teaches schoolchildren on Moturiki Island about climate change

We also take direct action on Caqalai, through beach cleans and under water clean ups; GVI
personnel are educated in the need to remove debris from under water from the shore. We conduct
clean up dives on the Caqalai house reef and beach cleans around Caqalai Island. The debris types
and volumes are recorded and this data contributes to the international data set of the Dive Against
Debris project run by Project AWARE.

Project AWAREs Dive Against Debris data card

So far this year, our volunteers and staff have collected 127kg of debris from beach cleans and 5.5kg
of waste from underwater, a great achievement and a brilliant start to the year. The debris included
a grand total of 27 flip flops a 38inch television and a refrigerator door! As far as possible, items are
sent to the main island of Viti Levu to be recycled. Some waste is even repurposed here on base,
such mooring buoys or drift wood, though we havent managed to fix the television yet.

We hope to increase the frequency of the DAD dives and beach cleans to two each per week, now
that our volunteers who arrived in January have nearly completed all their dive and science training.
We are also hoping to expand our beach cleans to Moturiki in the near future, educating the local
residents on waste management and raising awareness of the need to reduce their waste and carry
out regular clean ups. These events will also be a great way to illustrate to the school children we
work with on Moturiki that they can have a real and tangible impact.

Thank you to all the volunteers and staff who have partaken in the underwater waste collection
dives and beach cleans, you have made a tremendous effort! This is an on-going project, so we will
continue to conduct these activities and we encourage others to do the same.