Plastic Drawdown: A rapid assessment tool for developing national responses to plastic pollution when data availability is limited, as demonstrated in the Maldives

•A rapid-assessment tool to support plastic pollution policy is presented.•Provides plastic waste flow analysis and visualization of policy instrument impacts.•Suitable for use in countries where data, technical and human capacity is limited.•Motivated Maldives Government to announce ambitious plastic phase out strategy.•Collaborative approach identified policies to achieve 85% less plastic pollution. Governments are increasingly supporting initiatives to address plastic pollution, but efforts are largely opportunistic or driven by national socio-political priorities. There is an urgent need to move away from piecemeal single product instruments (e.g. single use plastic bag taxes or plastic straw bans) to deliver system-wide strategies that minimise the most pervasive sources of plastic pollution. Developing a common understanding of a jurisdiction’s plastic waste stream and the solutions available to decision-makers is vital to build consensus across stakeholders and to align on an evidence-based portfolio of priority instruments. This paper presents the Plastic Drawdown framework as a boundary-spanning tool to quickly create a coherent, relevant, andcredible analysis and visualisation for stakeholders of plastic waste, leakage hotspots and minimisation opportunities. Using a new plastic waste modelling framework with a consultative structure, Plastic Drawdown explores plastic waste and leakage over a ten-year period and assesses impacts of policy instruments on this projection. Plastic Drawdown is adaptable to the data poor environment typical of many countries and designed as a rapid assessment tool to supportthe decision making of governments operating in a highly resource-constrained context. The Maldives is used as a case study to show the utility of the tool, where it highlighted strategies with the potential to reduce leakage of plastic waste into the marine environment by up to 85% by 2030. Plastic Drawdown built the case for phasing out single-use plastic waste across the Maldives and supported the Government’s decision to set ambitious targets, as announced at the United Nations General Assembly in 2019.