• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.54-65
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• 2012

While fishery has been continuously suffering from deteriorating economic feasibility, the amount of the deposited marine litter has been increasing due to an increased number of marine leisure tourists which are caused by an improved quality of life and five-day work week. In addition, the fishery area has been reduced by the reclamation projects and it is being destroyed by marine pollution with a variety of contaminants coming from land and sea. To protect and improve fisheries in these poor conditions, Korean governments have implemented the submerged marine litter collection projects. However, previous research results on the marine environment and resources indicate that it requires a lot of time investment to achieve tangible results of such improvement. The 300 billion won marine environment and resource investigation project has been executed since July 2004 by Korean governments, which demands strategic approaches to obtain more effective and satisfactory results before the project expires in 2013. Ocean environment research institutes and governments need to cooperate each other to gain efficient and reasonable achievement by identifying and linking related projects. This study suggests that the marine environment and resources investigation projects should run parallel with the submerged marine litter collection projects on mutually agreed research items in the identical area of the ocean to obtain cost-effective improvement of marine environment and fishery conditions.