What can I do?
Travel responsibly
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Tourism is a big sector in the region and you can choose cruise companies that
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Tourism is a big sector in the region and you can choose cruise companies that
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Help to protect local habitats and wildlife, also in coastal areas.
Be sure to follow the rules in national parks and nature reserves. Keep to the paths, don’t trample plants and leave animals in peace.
When boating, avoid causing noise and unnecessary waves. Consider establishing a marine protected area.
More reading: Ten ways to protect the Baltic Sea in everyday life (BSAG)
Don’t fish for critically endangered species like eels or Baltic Sea cod.
Only catch full-size fish and only take as many as you are going to eat. Please always remember to remove old fishing nets from the water and recycle them properly.
Some of the Baltic Sea’s fish stocks have been endangered by overfishing – and its adverse effects are severe.
More reading: Recreational fishing in the Baltic Sea region (CCB)
Baltic Sea warms faster than the global average! This impacts all the species living in it.
Reduce your energy consumption by turning the heating down and taking shorter showers, by favoring more ecological means of transport such as trains and other rail traffic, and by opting for other environmental consumer choices in your housing, heating and eating etc.
The Baltic Sea harbours a unique composition of species and landscapes. An estimated 100 species of fish, 450 species of macroalgae, 1000 zoobenthos species, 3000 plankton species and many thousands of unknown species of bacteria and viruses create the unique underwater biodiversity of the Baltic Sea.
Achieving a good status of biodiversity is a HELCOM priority, strengthened by, among other things, the revised Helsinki Convention in 1992 and the Baltic Sea Action Plan. However, many species are still under threat. It is anticipated that biodiversity will show signs of improvement in the coming years, as the effects of recently implemented measures start to be seen, but continued efforts to improve the environmental status of biodiversity are of key importance.
Baltic Sea knowledge: Biodiversity
HELCOM Action Areas:
Reduce your meat intake. International assessments state that the current beef production practices have the greatest impact on eutrophication and climate change, e.g. because fertilizers used in the fields cause excess algal blooms in the Baltic Sea.
Wastewater from summer cottages – or any houses – near bodies of water may get washed into the Baltic Sea. This wastewater contains eutrophicating nutrients and various hazardous chemicals, It is important to treat wastewater properly!
You can help to reduce eutrophication by eating wild fish, such as cyprinoid fish caught in the Baltic Sea.
Also, remember that a lot of unnecessary emissions come from food waste. So, eat what you buy and keep waste to a minimum!
Inputs of nitrogen and phosphorus have been increasing for a long time in the Baltic Sea, mainly between the 1950s and the late 1980s, causing eutrophication symptoms of increasing severity to the ecosystem. As a response to the deteriorating development, actions to reduce nutrient loading were agreed on by the 1988 HELCOM Ministerial Declaration, and reaching a Baltic Sea unaffected by eutrophication is included as one of the main goals of the Baltic Sea Action Plan (BSAP).
Several HELCOM eutrophication assessments have been carried out since the agreement of the Baltic Sea Action Plan, to follow-up on the status of eutrophication of the Baltic Sea.
Baltic Sea knowledge: Eutrophication
HELCOM Action Areas:
You protect what you love, and you love what you know and understand! That is why it is so crucial to spread knowledge about the Baltic Sea and the many challenges it is facing.
The ocean literacy campaign of HELCOM wants to raise attention to the main working areas of the Baltic Sea Action Plan and give some concrete resources for civil action.
What can we do about the declining state of the sea?
The materials consist of four videos on biodiversity, eutrophication, hazardous substances and litter, and sea-based activities, or shipping.
Ocean literacy is an understanding of the ocean’s influence on you—and your influence on the ocean. The Earth has one big ocean with many features, as all major watersheds on Earth drain to the ocean.
Find out more about the seven Essential Principles of Ocean Literacy here.
(Available until end of 2024) – A series of self-paced Ocean Literacy training courses has been developed by IOC-UNESCO, specifically targeting educators, media professionals, architects and urban planners, government officials and civil society and are hosted on IOC-UNESCO’s training platform, OceanTeacher Global Academy. These self-paced courses include lectures, case-studies, video messages from guest speakers, quizzes and online forums, as well as recorded webinars.
HELCOM has recently launched its revamped HELCOM Metadata Catalogue, a tool that provides context and background to the datasets in the HELCOM Map and Data Service, which contains Baltic-specific geospatial data ranging from status assessments to shipping density maps, and totalling up to more than 1,000 individual maps.
“With the new catalogue, our users can easily browse or search metadata records, such as information on data collection, lineage, attribute descriptions, date published, format, INSIPRE theme and so on, to quickly acquire context on the dataset and establish if it is relevant for their needs,” said Matthew Richard, the HELCOM coordinator of the Baltic Data Flows project.
The updated resource now has an easy-to-use web interface to search geospatial data across multiple catalogues. The search provides full-text search as well as faceted search such as on keywords, resource types, organizations or scale. Users can easily refine the search and quickly get to the records of interest.
“The HELCOM Metadata Catalogue is now INSPIRE compatible in terms of metadata standards on HELCOM datasets,” said Richard. “This is important to ensure compliance under the EU INSPIRE directive that aims to facilitate the harmonisation, sharing, and reuse of spatial datasets with multiple users and decision-makers across Europe.”
The Metadata Catalogue is built on the latest stable GeoNetwork version 3.12, which is designed to manage spatially referenced resources that provides powerful metadata editing and search functions.
The HELCOM GeoNetwork implementation has been configured to be INSPIRE compatible in terms of metadata on datasets and contains a tool to validate metadata records against the INSPIRE validator. The INSPIRE validator and thesauri were used during development to ensure all metadata records are INSPIRE compliant. The metadata catalogue has also been configured for data harvesting to the ‘data.europa.eu’, and other relevant metadata harvesting initiatives.
The catalogue was updated as part of the Baltic Data Flows project, which seeks to enhance the sharing and harmonisation of data on the marine environment originating from existing sea monitoring programmes, and to move towards service-based data sharing. The project is being led by HELCOM and co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union.
To provide a better understanding of the effects of climate change in the Baltic Sea, Baltic Earth and HELCOM have recently published the first Baltic Sea Climate Change Fact Sheet. The publication compiles the latest available science in the region on what has now become a global emergency.
“The Baltic Sea Climate Change Fact Sheet provides a summary for policy makers of the latest scientific knowledge on how climate change is currently affecting the Baltic Sea and about what we can expect to happen in the future,” said Prof. Markus Meier from the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde and Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, and chair of the Baltic Earth Science Steering Group, who coordinated the publication as leading authority on climate change in the Baltic Sea.
According to the fact sheet, in the Baltic Sea, water temperature and sea level will rise, and sea ice cover will decrease – in turn affecting ecosystems and marine species, as well as maritime activities such as shipping, fisheries and aquaculture.
“Water temperatures of the Baltic Sea have been increasing during the past 100 years and are projected to further increase during the 21st century,” said Prof. Meier, adding that the current projections suggest a largely ice-free Baltic Sea during normal winters by the end of the century.
Jointly developed by Baltic Earth and HELCOM, the Fact Sheet contains information about 34 parameters ranging from air and water temperature to marine and coastal ecosystem services, grouped into six different categories: energy cycle, water cycle, carbon and nutrient cycles, sea level and wind, biota and ecosystems, human activities, and services.
“With the fact sheets, we want to make sure that decision-makers are informed about the latest scientific knowledge on climate change and its impacts on the marine environment and maritime activities of the Baltic Sea,” said Jannica Haldin who is overseeing climate change related work at HELCOM.
A complete yet concise and easy to read publication, the fact sheet is meant to help policy makers to include climate change considerations in their work and decisions. More broadly, it also seeks to inform the public about the effects of climate change in the Baltic Sea.
The fact sheet is a summary of the regional counterpart, the Baltic Earth Assessment Reports, of the world wide reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, empowering decision makers to carry out timely, ambitious and coordinated climate action.
About 100 experts from the entire Baltic Sea region were involved in the making of the fact sheet, which was developed by the Joint Climate Change expert network (EN CLIME) run by Baltic Earth and HELCOM. The Baltic Sea Climate Change Fact Sheet is expected to be updated every seven years.