AMBIO 2015, 44(Suppl. 3):S335–S344 DOI 10.1007/s13280-015-0653-9 Baltic Sea management: Successes and failures Ragnar Elmgren, Thorsten Blenckner, Agneta Andersson Abstract Severe environmental problems documented in Kattegat (bottom salinity 32–34) and weakening inwards to the Baltic Sea in the 1960s led to the 1974 creation of the the Gulf of Bothnia. This causes stagnation of the bottom Helsinki Convention for the Protection of the Marine water, and in recent decades has led to widespread deep- Environment of the Baltic Sea Area. We introduce this water oxygen deficiency, seasonal in Kattegat and the special issue by briefly summarizing successes and failures of Danish Sounds, near-permanent in the Baltic proper, inter- Baltic environmental management in the following 40 years. mittent in the Gulf of Finland, but not affecting the Gulf of The loads of many polluting substances have been greatly Bothnia. Water renewal is slow, on the order of 50 years for reduced, but legacy pollution slows recovery. Top predator the whole Baltic (description above based on Leppa¨ranta populations have recovered, and human exposure to potential and Myrberg 2009), making it vulnerable to pollution from toxins has been reduced. The cod stock has partially the surrounding catchment (Fig. 1), with an area four times recovered. Nutrient loads are decreasing, but deep-water larger than the Baltic Sea, and a human population of some anoxia and cyanobacterial blooms remain extensive, and 85 million (Sweitzer et al. 1996). The waters of the Baltic climate change threatens the advances made. Ecosystem- Sea are generally cold, with the northern areas freezing over based management is the agreed principle, but in practice the every winter, but the surface waters heat up in summer, in various environmental problems are still handled separately, warm years to over 20 °C. These gradients cause large dif- since we still lack both basic ecological knowledge and ferences in ecological conditions along the sea, with biodi- appropriate governance structures for managing them versity declining sharply with salinity (Remane and together, in a true ecosystem approach. Schlieper 1971; Ojaveer et al. 2010). The Baltic Sea is surrounded by nine riparian countries Keywords Eutrophication Á with a further five in the catchment, making its manage- Persistent organic pollutants Á Overfishing Á ment politically complicated. Yet, it is perhaps the sea area Ecosystem-based management Á Climate change with the longest record of scientific research and coop- eration (Mills 1989), which from an early stage was ex- pressly intended to support management of living marine INTRODUCTION resources. The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), founded in 1901, was one of the first in- The Baltic Sea including the Kattegat (Fig. 1) is a large, ternational intergovernmental scientific organizations and almost non-tidal North European inland sea of 393 000 km2, focused on the Baltic and North Seas and their living re- with a mean depth of a mere 54 m. It is divided into a series sources (Rozwadowski 2002). When environmental prob- of basins, mostly separated by shallow sounds or sills. Sur- lems started to be seen as a threat to living marine face salinity gradually declines inwards, from 18–26 in the resources in the late 1960s, an ICES working group Kattegat to 2–4 in the innermost Bothnian Bay (using the documented severe environmental problems in the Baltic unit-free Practical Salinity Scale, which is near-identical to Sea (ICES 1970). These led to the formulation and 1974 older scales with units of g/kg or %). There is also perma- signing of the Helsinki Convention for the Protection of the nent salinity stratification with depth, strongest in the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area, which is Ó The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com www.kva.se/en 123 S336 AMBIO 2015, 44(Suppl. 3):S335–S344 Fig. 1 Baltic Sea map showing subareas, coastal nations, catchment border, and 60 m isobaths. Gulf of Bothnia = Bothnian Sea ? Bothnian Bay governed by the Helsinki Commission (HELCOM, http:// that the interactions of all components of the ecosystem, www.helcom.fi/; Elmgren 2001). From the beginning, this including humans, should be considered in the manage- convention had an emphasis on ecosystem management ment process (e.g., Jansson 1972; Likens 1992), but start- (Rozwadowski 2002), as was made formally explicit in ing with the Biodiversity Convention, EBM has come to 1992, when the convention was renegotiated after the signify a management process that also has social goals, fragmentation of the Soviet Union. such as an open and transparent democratic process with Since it was adopted by the Convention for Biological strong stakeholder participation, and an equitable distri- Diversity at the Rio Conference in 1992, ecosystem-based bution of the gains in human well-being resulting from management (EBM) has become the norm for international improved management (Levin and Lubchenco 2008). The conventions and organizations, such as ICES and the Food research on EBM has also increasingly become a search for and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Leslie indices and markers suitable for assessing progress for the and McLeod 2007), as well as in EU’s Water and Marine political process (e.g., UNEP/GPA 2006; Curtin and Strategy Framework Directives (Anon. 2000, 2008). Ac- Prezello 2010), rather than for a deeper understanding of cepting that EBM is the desired goal does not, however, ecosystem processes (cf. Thrush and Dayton 2010). without appropriate institutional basis and funding, guar- The four decades since 1974 seem a suitable period over antee its real life implementation (O¨ sterblom et al. 2010). which to evaluate successes and failures in the Helsinki In the early days, ‘‘the ecosystem approach’’ simply meant Convention’s application of the ecosystem approach, Ó The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com 123 www.kva.se/en AMBIO 2015, 44(Suppl. 3):S335–S344 S337 aimed initially to ‘‘protect and enhance the environment of oxygen-deficient bottom waters in the Baltic proper was the Baltic Sea’’ (HELCOM 1993) and, after 1992, to also largely anthropogenic. ‘‘prevent and eliminate pollution in order to promote the After 1974, the first decades of research described the ecological restoration of the Baltic Sea Area and the basic functioning of the ecosystem (Jansson 1972; Elmgren preservation of its ecological balance’’ (HELCOM 2008). 1984), and gave initial estimates of nutrient loads and effects In the following, we briefly describe some notable suc- (Larsson et al. 1985). International management was ini- cesses and failures in the management of the major envi- tially largely ineffective, due to political divisions, scientific ronmental problems of the Baltic Sea, and assess how well uncertainty, and weak governance structures. The many the management process lives up to the ideals of EBM. We problems of the Baltic Sea were tackled separately, often by also discuss some new challenges for the future. entirely different management bodies; the fishery even by a The two research programs this special issue reports on, separate convention, the Gdansk Convention (signed 1973). Baltic Ecosystem Adaptive Management (BEAM) at Still, use of a few problem pollutants, such as DDT Stockholm University and Ecosystem dynamics in the (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) and PCBs (polychlori- Baltic Sea in a changing climate perspective (ECO- nated biphenyls), was soon restricted or banned in the Baltic CHANGE) at Umea˚ and Linnaeus Universities, are ex- area. Concentrations of DDT, PCBs, dioxins, and dibenzo- amples of the type of interdisciplinary research needed to furans have since decreased rapidly in wildlife, demon- support EBM (Botey et al. 2014). strating the effectiveness of mitigation (Nyberg et al. 2015). After a lag, previously highly threatened Baltic seal and white-tailed eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla) populations re- ENVIRONMENTAL SUCCESSES AND FAILURES covered rapidly, helped also by various conservation mea- OF THE HELCOM PERIOD sures (Helander et al. 2008; Roos et al. 2012), visibly improving Baltic Sea biodiversity. Nevertheless, concen- Toxic pollutants trations of dioxins and dioxin-like PCBs in fatty fish from parts of the Baltic remain higher than the maximum allowed The ICES (1970) report considered toxic pollutants as the in foodstuffs by EU. An exception from EU rules permits the foremost threat to the Baltic, with particular emphasis on sale of such fish for human consumption in Sweden and heavy metals and DDT, but acknowledged that there was Finland, where they are the main route of human exposure to a large knowledge gap concerning other persistent organic dioxin-like compounds. Even so, human exposure, as rep- pollutants (POPs). Based on toxicological experience resented by the toxic equivalent levels of such compounds in from industrial exposure, heavy metals, also emitted to air mothers’ milk in Sweden, has decreased 6.5 % per year over and freshwater, were seen as posing a direct threat to a 40-year period from 1972 (Fig. 2;Fa˚ng et al. 2013), a truly humans. Industrial pollution, for example from pulp and remarkable improvement. Overall, the management of POPs paper mills, was commonplace and oil spills were fre- is the greatest success story in Baltic environmental man- quent and often large, soiling shores and killing seabirds. agement but, for some groups of problem compounds, action Untreated sewage was an obvious problem in many has still been hesitant and tardy, e.g., for perfluorinated enclosed coastal areas, especially near large cities, and compounds (Roos et al. 2013) and many endocrine-dis- some suspected that the recent increase in the area of rupting chemicals (UNEP/WHO 2013). A 30 B 30 C 30 D 60 fat fat fat -1 fat -1 20 20 -1 20 40 -1 10 10 10 20 PCDF, pg g dl-PCB, pg g PCDD, pg g total TEQ, pg g 0 0 0 0 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 Fig.