2nd Stakeholder Conference on the HELCOM Baltic Sea Action Plan

Concluding remarks by Mr. Mieczyslaw S. Ostojski

Chairman of the Helsinki Commission

After today’s extensive deliberations I neither want to prolong the discussions nor do I intend to make an extensive summary of what we have discussed.

But I would like to make some observations:

-         this is the first time that we decide on management actions taking as our starting point the needs of the Baltic Sea

-         these needs we have derived from our best available scientific knowledge about the Baltic ecosystem and its dynamics, and we have quantified the needs by using targets, associated to ecological objectives, describing defining the good ecological status of the Baltic Sea.

In this way the Baltic Sea has raised its voice and it is now up to us to do the remaining work and take the consequential management decisions.

We know that to achieve a healthy Baltic Sea we need an integrated management of human activities, which means that all of us – the decision makers, the managers, civil servants, business and interests groups in all sectors and the society as a whole - need to take into account the impacts of human activities on the Baltic Sea in all policies and programmes for the Baltic Sea region, both at the stage of their design as well as their implementation.

This is to ensure the integration of environment objectives with economic and socio-economic goals and thus a sustainable use of the marine goods and services provided by the Baltic Sea.  When jointly putting our efforts in implementing the action plan, we will be able to achieve its goals in the most cost effective way.

Thanks to your input, I believe that we have come closer towards our goal: to present on 15 November this year to the nine Baltic Coastal States’ environmental ministers and the EC Environment Commissioner an ambitious plan setting out the actions by which we will achieve a healthy Baltic Sea and which will satisfy to the greatest possible extent the expectations and needs of different stakeholder groups.

Believing that many of you would have wanted to give more extensive comments as to the specific actions to be included to the Plan, I warmly welcome you to submit your proposals to the HELCOM Secretariat.

Your proposals will feed into the on-going process within HELCOM to further elaborate the actions for inclusion to the HELCOM Baltic Sea Action Plan.

And I would of course, especially, like to thank those persons who dedicated their time to chairing and those making presentations during this conference. As a token of our appreciation we would like to give to you an edition of HELCOM’s – and the regions only we believe – book describing and displaying the variety of life in our sea.

As a concluding remark I would like to stress that today’s conference has given a substantial input to the continued successful elaboration of the HELCOM Baltic Sea Action Plan. All of which we will further discuss during the next two days in the annual meeting of the Helsinki Commission.

Thank you.