Recycling is a key to the sustainable marine ecology and economy
Kalervo Väänänen,
Professor, Rector Emeritus,
University of Turku,
Finland
Throughout the ages, man has been thinking of the seas to be so great, that his actions does not affect them. All pollution that enters the sea, be it toxins, sewage, nutrients or plastic waste, is thought to dissolve and mysteriously disappear into the oceans and to their an almost infinite amount of water without being able to affect marine life.
Now, this fundamentally the same line of thought is in our approach to cleaning up polluted seas. All too easily, we think the seas are too big to clean, and we push the whole thing into the background of our thinking.
However, when we stop to think, every responsible person understands that both ideas are absolutely wrong. The seas are not too large to be damaged by human activities. Nor are they so large that we could once cleanse the damaged sea and restore its original vitality. The question is how strong our common will is on this issue.
Now, at the latest, it is time to embark on determined measures to improve the state of the seas, both through global joint efforts and through regional efforts that go as far as one individual. Each of us can do something to ensure the viability of the seas for future generations as well.
Climate change is the biggest threat to marine health. This does not mean that, under its guise, we can abandon local measures to reduce the burden on the various sea areas. Healing the seas requires both mitigating climate change and reducing local nutrient emissions, toxic emissions and littering, especially plastic littering.
The importance of climate change for marine health comes through a number of different mechanisms. The sea is the largest single carbon sink. The seas sequester more than a third of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This has had a clear impact on the state of both the seas and their organisms. Increased dissolution of carbon dioxide acidifies the sea. This, in turn, has major implications for marine animal and plant health. Perhaps most clearly this is evident in the dying corals. The shell of corals is mainly calcium carbonate, the solubility of which is strongly dependent on pH.
In the case of the Baltic Sea, the effects of climate change are increasing rainfall in the catchment area. This will further dilute the low salinity, which in turn will have a major impact on the current viability of fish in the Baltic Sea, as well as other species.
In the Baltic Sea region, both public and cross-border actions by private organizations have been quite effective in reducing the burden on the sea. However, it is good to remember that Europe’s largest desert is at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Once dead, the seabed takes a long time to recover. If recovering at all.
There are areas in every sea that are more sensitive to external stress, such as nutrient loads, than others are. In the Baltic Sea, such an area is, for example, the Archipelago Sea between Finland and Sweden. The archipelago sea is very shallow on the Finnish side. The average depth is only 23 meters. Thousands of small islands affect water flows and nutrient loads brought by rivers in the catchment area dissolve in a relatively small amount of water. This had caused the eutrophication of the Archipelago Sea, although stricter agricultural regulations have reduced the amount of nutrients used already for a couple of decades. Over the last hundred years, more than 40 million tons of mineral phosphate have been imported from outside to the Baltic Sea catchment area. We know now that it takes decades to drain from the fields into the sea.
With the eutrophication of the sea, both natural values and business opportunities are lost.
The widespread application of the principles of the circular economy in the marine environment would be the key to improving marine health*. It would also provide much greater opportunities for the use of the goods provided by the seas. For the most part, for example, the technology for making recycled fertilizers already exists. It is an outmost importance that we apply immediately all possible means to reduce nutrient flow into Archipelago Sea and develop rapidly new technology to remove excess of nutrients both from the catchment area and directly from the sea. Removal of nutrients, especially phosphorus and nitrogen, in large scale from the ecosystem formed by the catchment area of Archipelago Sea and the sea itself is urgently needed to save this unique ecological entity with tens of thousands of small islands and characteristic fauna and flora.
*This has been discussed in details in our recent book entitled “Saaristomeren Sininen kirja” in Finnish and “Skärgårdshavets Blåa Bok” in Swedish (ISBN 978-952-69442-3-4 (PDF)).
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