The DOI matches its Crossref record; 134 of the 134 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The fundamental links between climate change and marine plastic pollution
Open accessAbstract
Plastic pollution and climate change have commonly been treated as two separate issues and sometimes are even seen as competing. Here we present an alternative view that these two issues are fundamentally linked. Primarily, we explore how plastic contributes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the beginning to the end of its life cycle. Secondly, we show that more extreme weather and floods associated with climate change, will exacerbate the spread of plastic in the natural environment. Finally, both issues occur throughout the marine environment, and we show that ecosystems and species can be particularly vulnerable to both, such as coral reefs that face disease spread through plastic pollution and climate-driven increased global bleaching events. A Web of Science search showed climate change and plastic pollution studies in the ocean are often siloed, with only 0.4% of the articles examining both stressors simultaneously. We also identified a lack of regional and industry-specific life cycle analysis data for comparisons in relative GHG contributions by materials and products. Overall, we suggest that rather than debate over the relative importance of climate change or marine plastic pollution, a more productive course would be to determine the linking factors between the two and identify solutions to combat both crises.
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Citations
Cites
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Microplastics in the marine environment
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Chamas, A., Moon, H., Zheng, J., Qiu, Y., Tabassum, T., Jang, J. H., Abu-Omar, M., Scott, S. L., & Suh, S. (2020) · ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering · doi:10.1021/acssuschemeng.9b06635 · Cited by 3,463
Global warming and recurrent mass bleaching of corals
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“Marine plastic debris also hosts unique assemblages of marine microbial 333 communities known as the “Plastisphere” (Cornejo-D’Ottone et al., 2020; Zettler et al., 2013), which 334 will become more abundant with predicted increases in plastic production and mis-managed waste 335 (Borrelle et al.,…”
Background
Cited by
Raman Microspectroscopy evidence of microplastics in human semen
Montano, L., Giorgini, E., Notarstefano, V., Notari, T., Ricciardi, M., Piscopo, M., & Motta, O. (2023) · Science of The Total Environment · doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.165922 · Cited by 243
Pérez-Huertas, S., Calero, M., Ligero, A., Pérez, A., Terpiłowski, K., & Martín-Lara, M. A. (2023) · Waste Management · doi:10.1016/j.wasman.2023.02.022 · Cited by 45
Fian, L., Felt, U., Hofmann, T., White, M. P., & Pahl, S. (2025) · Journal of Environmental Psychology · doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2025.102583 · Cited by 8
Metadata
- Authors
- Ford, H. V., Jones, N. H., Davies, A. J., Godley, B. J., Jambeck, J. R., Napper, I. E., Suckling, C. C., Williams, G. J., Woodall, L. C., & Koldewey, H. J.
- Venue
- Science of The Total Environment
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2022-02
- Volume
- 806
- Issue
- Pt 1
- Pages
- 150392
- ISSN
- 0048-9697 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3200260303
- Cited by
- 396
- References
- 134
- FWCI
- 15.22
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
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- The paper
- Ford, H. V., Jones, N. H., Davies, A. J., Godley, B. J., Jambeck, J. R., Napper, I. E., Suckling, C. C., Williams, G. J., Woodall, L. C., & Koldewey, H. J. (2022). The fundamental links between climate change and marine plastic pollution. Science of The Total Environment. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.150392
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
