Adaptation and mitigation strategies for controlling stochastic water pollution: An application to the Baltic Sea

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and compare the costs of two strategies against transboundary water pollution, mitigation and adaptation measures, which are linked with respect to risk. Chance constraint programming is applied, and the analytical results indicate that total costs for given probabilistic targets are higher (lower) than the costs without risk linkage for negative (positive) covariance between the two classes of measures. A comparison of two international policies—cooperation and national uniform standards—indicates that cleaning under non-cooperative uniform national standards can be increased when considering stochastic pollution and linkage in risk between mitigation and adaptation measures. The empirical application to the Baltic Sea shows that the risk linkage can increase or decrease minimum costs for a given probabilistic target under cooperative solutions by 17 or 13%, and decrease the cost under national uniform policy for a given overall probabilistic target by approximately 10%.