Five trillion pieces of plastic debris have found their way into seas and onto beaches around the world, threatening the health of users and damaging the marine biodiversity that depends upon unpolluted sea and shores for survival. It’s a global problem but perhaps there’s a local solution. Through marine education, beach monitoring and community cleaning projects, stakeholders are working together to remove increasingly damaging litter from vulnerable beaches.

As part of one such initiative, Civil Air Support has been engaged by the Moray Firth Coastal Partnership to support its ‘Our Firth, Our Seashore’ (OFOS) project. OFOS aims to promote community group engagement and empower local communities to take ownership of their coastal environment in the Highlands of Scotland.

OFOS reflects a similar Civil Air Support endeavour in 2018 & 2019 when the ‘Scotland’s Coastal Rubbish Aerial Photography’ (SCRAPbook) initiative used aerial photography collected by the aviation charity’s aircraft to produce a snapshot of macro litter distribution around the coast of mainland Scotland, Mull, and Orkney.

For the current OFOS project, Civil Air Support pilots and observers have been asked to photograph the coastline of the Moray Firth this year, and again in 2023 following beach cleaning work to provide ‘before and after’ imagery. In this way the impact of local beach cleaning activities can be measured and used to support the strategic planning of similar initiatives in the future.