Commitments for the Baltic Sea need to be backed by real Actions
Commitments of the highest political level are required and most necessary to reach the ambitious targets as the recent Baltic Sea Action Summit in Helsinki illustrates. In fact national action plans are soon to be adopted at the next HELCOM Ministerial meeting in Moscow in May this year.
Nevertheless, these commitments need to be backed by concrete actions, and the national governments need to increase significantly their support to environmental investments in cooperation with other financiers.
Good news have been achieved in St Petersburg already in 2005 when the Russian President Putin, Finnish President Halonen and Swedish Prime Minister Persson inaugurated the Southwest Wastewater Treatment Plant as the first flagship project of the Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership (NDEP) followed by other projects.
NDEP was stems from a Finnish initiative in 2000 and offers a successfully proven model of combining loan financing from the IFIs with grant funding from multilateral and bilateral sources and national budgets to make municipal environmental projects feasible. Kaliningrad wastewater treatment is the next challenge where Russian federal funding is linked with NDEP resources.
Based on NDEP success in north-west Russia, Belarus joined the Partnership in 2009 to improve its wastewater treatment for the benefit of the Baltic Sea, which gives a final positive outlook for full wastewater treatment in the Baltic Sea basin within the agreed timeframe by 2021.
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