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A maritime community with a shared future: bridging fragmented legal regulations for marine plastic pollution

Nature Geoscience 2025
Zhao Liu

Summary

This study proposed the Maritime Community with a Shared Future (MCSF) as a governance framework to address the fragmented legal landscape for marine plastic pollution, arguing through comparative legal analysis that MCSF and the proposed global plastics treaty have a symbiotic rather than competitive relationship. The research provided a negotiation pathway for the global plastics treaty by demonstrating how MCSF principles can align with and reinforce international treaty objectives.

Marine plastic pollution highlights the limitations of fragmented governance regimes. This study proposes the Maritime Community with a Shared Future (MCSF) as a framework to address this challenge. Through comparative legal analysis of treaty conflicts and case studies of the INC process, we demonstrate that the MCSF and the proposed global plastics treaty are designed to have a symbiotic relationship, rather than a competitive one. This research provides a negotiation pathway for the global plastics treaty.

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