Dumped and discarded: The fishing nets that threaten Nigeria’s marine life

The riverbanks of Okerenkoko in the Niger Delta are littered with broken fishing nets.

Fishers in this major fishing community in the city of Warri, southern Nigeria, may hope they will drift away and eventually disappear, out of sight and out of mind. But they don’t.

The nets become “ghost gear”, continuing to trap marine life long after they have been abandoned, lost or simply discarded.

Gillnets – often characterised as the most environmentally damaging type of net – dominate Nigeria’s small-scale fisheries. But a study of fishing gear disposal practices among artisanal fishers in the Niger Delta, published last year, found that 92% were unaware of the ecological risks posed by ghost gear.

Furthermore, fishers in Okerenkoko (also known as Okerenghigho) told Dialogue Earth they thought discarded nets had little impact on marine life. “They only catch crabs sometimes, which any passerby can then claim,” says James Mulade, a fisher from the community.

Abraham Ekperusi knows this is far from the truth. A researcher at Okerenkoko’s Nigeria Maritime University, Ekperusi was the lead author of the fishing gear disposal study. He has been researching ghost gear in Nigeria and the wider Gulf of Guinea area since 2018. As well as confirming a widespread misunderstanding of these harms, the study also found that 66% of those fishers surveyed reuse old nets, 18% burn them and 16% choose “indiscriminate dumping”.

These dumped nets can devastate marine life. Fishing gear is engineered to survive harsh marine conditions: mammals, birds, reptiles and fish can continue to become entangled long after a net has been lost or dumped at sea. As Ekperusi says, “what makes it strong for fishing is what makes it dangerous in the ocean”.

Fishing gear can devastate marine life long after being discarded or lost, as seen with these branched corals that had been tangled in nets and ripped from the sea floor (Image: MichaelGrant / Alamy)

National regulations on the disposal of fishing gear are currently lacking. “There is very limited regulation and almost zero enforcement,” Ekperusi explains, noting that change is certainly needed. He suggests a “carrot and stick” approach: campaigns, incentives, updated regulations and, eventually, enforcement – once communities understand and accept the rules.

In some Niger Delta communities, fishers “are already pulling out discarded gillnets instead of fish” when they go to sea, he notes.

Why do so many nets end up in Nigerian waters?

A combination of tides, infrastructure and insecurity pushes nets into Nigeria’s waters.

Joshua Nathaniel leads operations at the Nigerian NGO, Stand Out for Environment Restoration (Sofer), the only organisation in the country with a dedicated ghost gear programme. He describes how unpredictable ocean conditions can force fishers to abandon gear to save themselves: “I’ve personally witnessed [strong tidal currents] cut a fisherman’s boat to pieces. When these events happen, they’re only thinking of escaping and surviving that tide first, and not the net.”

Oil and gas pipelines beneath the water pose another hazard, trapping and tearing off chunks of nets that go on to endanger marine life. “These nets get entangled in the pipelines underwater and most times [fishers] cannot retrieve all of the parts,” Nathaniel explains. “The other parts are abandoned and remain there.”

Conflict with industrial trawlers is another problem. Nigeria’s regulations on fishing require that these trawlers operate beyond five nautical miles from the coast, so artisanal fishers may have a chance to rely on catches nearer to shore. But Ekperusi and Nathaniel say enforcement is weak: trawlers often sweep through nearshore waters, pulling up smaller fishers’ gillnets as they go. These lost nets are unlikely to be disposed of carefully by fishing boats that are willing to operate in areas where they should not be.

Fishing gear can also be lost due to piracy. On sight of a pirate boat, fishers often abandon everything and flee to save their boat and its engine – the most valuable item, often targeted by pirates.

What to do with the waste?

A huge problem for Nigerian fishers is that even where they are aware of the problem and want to dispose of their gear safely at the end of its life, there is a lack of options.

“We have no [publicly-run] retrieval programme, no recycling system, no disposal system or even policies around these issues,” says Ekperusi. “Fishers have nowhere to put their nets.”

So, in fishing communities like Okerenkoko, when nets break or are contaminated by oil spills, they are burned, discarded in riverbanks or buried. Sometimes, floods expose buried nets and carry them out into rivers and the sea.

Local divers and researchers have been observing and documenting the extent to which ghost nets cause destruction to marine life underwater. They trap loggerhead sea turtles, crabs, sharks, freshwater snakes, and even the slow-moving West African manatee that lives along parts of the Niger Delta.

“Sometimes, we see sea turtles struggling to get out of those trapped nets,” says Temidunmi Adeyemi, a fisher from Costain, another fishing community in Warri.

During one offshore dive, a Sofer worker surfaced shaken after finding a net containing an estimated 26 sea turtles. Some were already dead, while others were still struggling to escape. “From what we’ve seen, what goes on underwater is far worse than people imagine,” Nathaniel says.

Local innovation to change the cycle

To fight the problem, Sofer has built a model based on prevention, mitigation and remediation. The organisation begins by meeting traditional leaders, fishers and the women who process the catch to design interventions together. “They definitely understand the problem better than anyone,” Nathaniel says. “That’s why the solutions must come from them, too.”

Sofer then shares information with fishers about the HubNet, a locally designed receptacle where they can bring end-of-life nets. These are typically kiosk-like structures that are durable yet easy to set up. HubNets have been installed in six communities across Nigeria and neighbouring Cameroon to offer an alternative to dumping nets in the environment.

“Ghost gears are prevalent because they don’t have a disposal system,” Nathaniel says. “What we’re able to use HubNets to do changes that.”

In addition to the HubNet programme, Sofer’s teams also recover lost and discarded nets from the ocean. Since this “offshore recovery” project began in 2021, retrievers have collected more than 3.5 tonnes of ghost gear. After retrieval, the nets are cleaned, then transformed by fishers who have been trained to turn the material into woven fabrics, bags and shoes to be sold by Sofer. This has created an alternative to selling old nets to local makers of dish sponges for NGN 500 (USD 0.35) per kilogram. Nathaniel hopes the retrieved material can also be turned into artworks, which could be even more profitable.

“When we started, we didn’t know what was possible,” he says. “Then a woman in Badagry [a coastal town in Lagos state] showed us how to use a loom to turn nets into fabric. That innovation came from the community.”

Funding limitations

Apart from fishers, Sofer has trained 305 women and girls to transform gillnets into woven fabrics for sale. It has also built a community education and welfare centre, and convened workshops with government officials, divers and fishers to discuss fisheries management.

Despite this progress, the organisation has only reached 12 communities across four Nigerian states and one community in Cameroon. Transportation costs, a lack of recycling infrastructure and limited funding are all barriers to expansion.

Nigeria’s Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy did not respond to Dialogue Earth’s request for comment.

Joel Baziuk is associate director of the Global Ghost Gear Initiative, an alliance of organisations incorporating the private sector, academia and governments, as well as NGOs including Sofer. He says solutions to gear disposal must be deeply local: “You can’t just take what works in Alaska or Australia and move that to Nigeria.”

In Baziuk’s view, the model that Sofer has created is “best in class”. “We would love to do that across West Africa, but we just haven’t been able to find a funding source yet,” he explains.

With funding, and more locally led campaigns, there is hope that a vital shift in fishers’ thinking on the ghost gear problem can be brought about. Work to date suggests it is possible.

“The fishers have started to return their end-of-life gear to the HubNet,” says Nathaniel, “and that is a sign they are beginning to recognise the negative impacts of indiscriminate disposal”.