Indeed, but I'd assume it's also a long way to go from doing it for a small section of the world to doing it everywhere and with multiple countries participating.
> Systematic global coverage of land surfaces from 56° S to 84° N, coastal waters, and all of the Mediterranean Sea
The constellation is not complete yet though. Sentinel-2C is planned to launch in September [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel-2 [1] https://www.satnow.com/launch-mission-details/sentinel-2c
Source: work in the industry
This probably isn't a good assumption. It's likely more about it being much faster to iterate/validate the methodology on the smaller dataset of just the Mediterranean (2.5 million km^2) before spending the effort to run it on the entire ocean (361 million km^2, 144x larger data).
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...
Most developing countries don’t have that infrastructure so plastic pollution is everywhere, regardless of how much they export to Western countries.
More than a third comes from The Philippines, India 13%, China 7%.
"Look, Vietnam, you are somehow responsible for 12.2% of the marine plastic in the ocean, with only 1.23% of the world population. We are making this trade agreement or that international investment conditional on that number improving by 2028."
Before, there was simply no way of monitoring these things. I had to invent that number. That is a massive problem in terms of the politics.
And it goes up the hierarchy as well. Vietnam can now also go "Ho Chi Minh City, look at this map, how on earth did that happen?"
Now we can actually monitor it, it's a way of keeping countries on the promises they have already made: https://www.oecd.org/ocean/topics/ocean-pollution/marine-pla...