Guanabara Bay in southeastern Brazil, also known as Atlantic Bay, is a world-famous tourist attraction, but in recent years, Guanabara Bay has been seriously polluted by human waste.
On the 19th, nearly 300 local fishermen and volunteers joined the operation to control Guanabara Bay. Their goal was to pick up and remove 20 tons of garbage in the bay on the same day.
More than 180 fishermen from the islands near Guanabara Bay and more than 100 civil environmental organizations formed the cleaning team on the day.
They work separately on land and at sea at the estuary, picking up garbage discarded by people’s activities, then sorting it up and recycling.
Fishermen participating in the clean-up said that in recent years, nearly 90 tons of garbage generated by human life have been dumped or discarded in Guanabara Bay every day, polluting the water quality of the bay and the nearby Atlantic Ocean and causing a large number of fish deaths.
Nearby fishermen’s fishing volume has plummeted every year, which has been seriously affected.
The Gulf of Guanabara, located on the west coast of Rio de Janeiro, is Brazil’s second largest bay. The pollution problem here has been a problem for many years.
Since 1995, the annual cleanup of Guanabara Bay has been one of the environmental governance goals of the Brazilian government.
After the venue of the sailing competition at the 2016 Rio Olympics was determined to be in Guanabara Bay, the Rio government also launched a new governance plan at that time, but with little success. Guanabara Bay was therefore criticized for garbage pollution and water quality during the Rio Olympics.
