Abstract
Abstract Improving the health of coastal and open sea marine ecosystems represents a substantial challenge for sustainable marine resource management, since it requires balancing human benefits and impacts on the ocean. This challenge is often exacerbated by incomplete knowledge and lack of tools that measure ocean and coastal ecosystem health in a way that allows consistent monitoring of progress towards predefined management targets. The lack of such tools often limits capabilities to enact and enforce effective governance. We introduce the Baltic Health Index (BHI) as a transparent, collaborative and repeatable assessment tool. The Index complements existing, more ecological‐oriented, approaches by including a human dimension on the status of the Baltic Sea, an ecosystem impacted by multiple anthropogenic pressures and governed by a multitude of comprehensive national and international policies. Using a large amount of social–ecological data available, we assessed the health of the Baltic Sea for nine goals that represent the status towards set targets, for example, clean waters, biodiversity, food provision, natural products extraction and tourism. Our results indicate that the overall health of the Baltic Sea is suboptimal (a score of 76 out of 100), and a substantial effort is required to reach the management objectives and associated targets. Subregionally, the lowest BHI scores were measured for carbon storage, contaminants and lasting special places (i.e. marine protected areas), albeit with large spatial variation. Overall, the likely future status of all goals in the BHI averaged for the entire Baltic Sea is better than the present status, indicating a positive trend towards a healthier Baltic Sea. However, in some Baltic Sea basins, the trend for specific goals was decreasing, highlighting locations and issues that should be the focus of management priorities. The BHI outcomes can be used to identify both pan‐Baltic and subregional scale management priorities and to illustrate the interconnectedness between goals linked by cumulative pressures. Hence, the information provided by the BHI tool and its further development will contribute towards the fulfilment of the UN Agenda 2030 and its Sustainability Development Goals. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.
Highlights
The health of the oceans and especially of their coastal areas is inextricably linked to human well-being and societal development, as marine ecosystems generate a large share of services needed and used by humans (Franke et al, 2020; Neumann et al, 2017)
We explicitly focus on the near-term future rather than longer term sustainability because the near-term future is most relevant to policymakers and long-term future states of many of the subgoals are very difficult to project
It is important to note that the subgoal economies describes one part of the human dimension of the Baltic Health Index (BHI) and combines data from several marine sectors, where some are independent on the state of the environment and some are dependent on the environment
Summary
The health of the oceans and especially of their coastal areas is inextricably linked to human well-being and societal development, as marine ecosystems generate a large share of services needed and used by humans (Franke et al, 2020; Neumann et al, 2017). Improving the health of coastal and open sea marine ecosystems, that is, sustainably delivering a range of benefits to people and in the future (Halpern et al, 2012), represents a substantial challenge for marine resource management since it requires balancing human benefits and impacts on the ocean. Reaching sustainability goals through ecosystem-based management (EBM) of the oceans requires an understanding of interactions between nature, society and the economy (Crowder & Norse, 2008; Long et al, 2015; Merkel, 1998) This is especially relevant following commitment of the global community to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, where in particular the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 (Life below water) seeks a balance between environmental, economic and social sustainability in relation to oceans and coastal development (UN, 2015). There is an urgent need for adequate metrics and tools that quantitatively and comprehensively measure ocean and coastal ecosystem health for better monitoring of progress towards predefined management targets
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