Sweden’s most beautiful patient

The Baltic Sea. Photo: Mauri Rautkari / WWF-Canon.

From July and the two years lying ahead Swedens chairs the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission. Therefore the organisation WWF has spent this summer putting the spotlight on the Baltic Sea. It is home for unique eco systems with a fantastic flora and fauna. But this environment is a very vulnerable one, largely affected by eutrophication (when nutrients leak out from the agriculture, for example) and too intensive fishing as well as “ordinary” pollution.

This summer we haven’t seen any algal bloom filling our shores here in the Stockholm archipelago. The winds have been on our side, pushing the blooming algae towards the South. But the accumulation of algae is nevertheless big. According to WWF an area that is 1000 kilometers long and 300 kilometers wide is now filled with blooming algae. This is one of the largest bloomings since the record year of 2005.

Algal bloom at its worst. Photo: Päivi Rosqvist / WWF-Finland.

So why is a bunch of microscopic plants such a big problem? In normal quantities they aren’t, but fed by all the things we let out into the ocean they grow uncontrollably. And when the algae die they consume a lot of the available oxygen in the water, creating a dead environment around them. Now an area in the Baltic Sea double the size of Denmark consist of dead sea bead.

But it isn’t too late to change this, says WWF. During the last years, stocks of fish are slowly starting to recover and the euthrophication subtances in the water are getting less concentrated.

Nevertheless we keep doing a lot of things to these waters that would never go unobserved if they happened on land, claims WWF. Below is a video clip from their campaign. The final text says: “Strange? This happens in the Baltic Sea every day”.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

July 30, 2010

• algal bloom
• Baltic Sea
• eutrophication
• sustainability