WP6: Governance

Work Package 6 Governance aims to lay the foundation for transboundary governance of the Baltic Sea MPA Network. 

This includes building a shared regional understanding of MPAs, supported by common terminology and ecologically meaningful protection targets and indicators. It also examines the threats and pressures facing Baltic Sea ecosystems and evaluates how effective current protection measures are. The ultimate goal is to optimize the MPA network by identifying the areas most in need of protection.

This work is led by Jannica Haldin from the HELCOM Secretariat.

Other partners involved: BfN, CCB, MoEFI, SwAM, SYKE, UTARTU & AAU.

The project has already prepared an agreed list of Baltic Sea ecosystem components—covering both species and abiotic habitats—that will serve as the backbone for ecological target setting for protected areas. 

The list of ecosystem components goes beyond the focus on protection, ensuring comparability and compatibility across regional assessments and analysis in the long term.

In parallel, and together with representatives from the ministries and national agencies from across the region, the project is developing a Protection Optimization Framework that sets out the region’s common vision, goals, and strategies. 

The intention is for the framework to be officially adopted at the political level, and thereby embedded into regional policy. This will guide how priorities are chosen, how actions are implemented, and how the network can be strengthened over time. 

The project also asks a critical governance question: are today’s protection and restoration measures sufficient? 

Building on existing methodologies, the team is enhancing tools and codes that assess the sufficiency of measures and is creating the region's first ever classification scheme for measures, so that measures can be compared across countries. 

This work provides a defined vocabulary for protection measures, ensuring that efforts can be tracked, evaluated, and improved. 

Ultimately, the work will deliver guidelines and a manual for assessing the sufficiency of measures, allowing managers to see whether current approaches are keeping pace with ecological needs.