Case Study: The Wilson Center achieves better marine litter tracking and forecasting with IBM

Overcoming data challenges to track and reduce marine litter

The Wilson Center, working with UNEP, faced a major challenge in tracking and reducing marine litter because beach cleanup and pollution data were fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to compare across locations. To address this, The Wilson Center partnered with IBM and used IBM Cloud Pak for Data, IBM Knowledge Catalog, and IBM Watson tools to unify and clean global marine litter data and create a more reliable foundation for analysis.

IBM implemented an end-to-end AI and data pipeline that enabled forecasting, dashboard reporting, and better citizen-science collaboration. The solution helped predict litter volumes up to 5 years into the future, support cleanup planning, and give stakeholders an executive dashboard to monitor trends by year, country, and beach, making marine pollution data more actionable for policy and prevention efforts.

The Wilson Center

Anne Bowser

Director of Innovation