PRIORITY TRANSBOUNDARY PROBLEMS

This chapter identifies the priority transboundary problems in the Black Sea, and then describes each transboundary problem in detail. In particular each section describes the problem and justifies its transboundary importance; details the environmental impacts and socio-economic consequences of each problem; highlights the linkages with other transboundary problems; and analyses the immediate underlying, and socio-economic, legal and political root causes.

Key transboundary problems and priority scores

Twenty-three transboundary problems were originally identified by the 22 members of the Technical Task Team (TTT) established to produce this report, in order to determine their relevance and transboundary nature in the context of the Black Sea. The group was asked to brainstorm and identify the major water related transboundary problems. This narrowed the original list down to 7 Black Sea transboundary problems:

1. Decline commercial species/fish stocks
2. Nutrient over-enrichment/eutrophication
3. Alien species introduction
4. Chemical pollution
5. Coastal erosion
6. Changes in the flow regime from rivers
7. Habitat and biodiversity changes

A further cross-cutting problem of global climate change was also identified.

This list was further refined by assigning a score to each transboundary problem of between 0 (no importance), 1 (low importance), 2 (moderate importance) and 3 (high importance) to determine the relevance of the problem from the perspective of the present day and 10-15 years in the future. When examining future change the TTT were asked to consider the effects of climate change. The scoring activity was based on the following suite of criteria:

• Transboundary nature of a problem.
• Scale of impacts of a problem on economic terms, the environment and human health.
• Relationship with other environmental problems.
• Expected multiple benefits that might be achieved by addressing a problem.
• Lack of perceived progress in addressing/solving a problem at the national level.
• Recognised multi-country water conflicts.
• Reversibility/irreversibility of the problem.

The outcomes of this activity are presented in Table 4.1.

Table 4.1        Priority transboundary problems in the Black Sea

* Including the effects of global climate change

Based on the prioritisation exercise, four priority transboundary problems in the Black Sea were identified for further detailed study. These were:

1. Nutrient over-enrichment/eutrophication
2. Decline in natural resources (e.g. fisheries)
3. Chemical pollution
4. Habitat and biodiversity changes - including alien species introduction