Impact of the marine litter pollution on the Mediterranean biodiversity: A risk assessment study with focus on the marine protected areas

Highlights: • A novel methodology for risk assessment of marine litter pollution is developed. • The risk for neutral and positive buoyancy particles is estimated. • Methodology based on the impact on a large number of species. • Hotspots and conditioning factors are identified. • Focus on the impact on MPAs and effectiveness of their protection. In this paper a novel methodology to assess the risk of marine litter (ML) pollution in the Mediterranean Sea is implemented. In this approach, the hazard component is estimated using a state-of-the-art 3D modeling system, which allows the simulation of floating and sinking ML particles; the exposure component is defined from biodiversity estimates; and the vulnerability is related to ML ingestion rates of each species. The results show that the hot-spots for the ML risk concentrate in the coastal regions, and are mainly conditioned by the biodiversity in the region. A dedicated analysis on the marine protected areas shows that the risk therein is controlled by the proximity to ML sources and that their present-day protection levels are not effective in the case of ML pollution. Only a reduction of ML at the sources could reduce the impact of ML pollution in protected areas.