Giving advice on cost effective measures for a cleaner Baltic Sea: a challenge for science

The Baltic Sea is one of the world's seas that is most severely affected by human activities. Although there is an international agreement that nutrient input to the Baltic should be reduced, the measures taken so far have not resulted in major reductions in nutrient inputs nor in environmental improvements. The reasons for this are partly due to lack of knowledge on large-scale relationships and couplings between physics, biogeochemistry and ecological properties. But there is also a lack of overall drainage basin-wide analyses on cost-effective measures. There is a danger in making the wrong decisions, e.g. implement reduction schemes that are at worst ineffective or at best, far from cost effective. Researchers from many disciplines are faced with a common challenge: To develop a decision-support system, which can be used as the scientific base for cost-effective measures for the entire Baltic Sea. Such an effort is now being made within the research program MARE (http://www.mare.su.se).