H.E. Markus MeierHead
Department of Physical Oceanography and Instrumentation, Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW)
Germany
Professor in Physical Oceanography
Rostock University
Germany
Chair
Baltic Earth Science Steering Group
Co-chair
HELCOM-Baltic Earth Expert Network on Climate Change (EN CLIME)
markus.meier@io-warnemuende.de
Karol KulinskiAssociate Professor and Head
Marine Biogeochemistry Section, Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences
Poland
Vice Chair
Baltic Earth Science Steering Group
Member
HELCOM-Baltic Earth Expert Network on Climate Change (EN CLIME)
Background
Changes in the geopolitical situation may have an impact on scientific cooperation between countries. For instance, this applies to the Baltic Sea region, which was characterised by the Cold War before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Iron Curtain separated scientists in the western and eastern block countries hampering scientific exchange. After the political changes in the 1990s, scientific cooperation between the countries emerged in order to exchange data and research findings. This gave birth to the Baltic Sea Experiment (BALTEX, https://www.baltex-research.eu/), now called Baltic Earth (https://baltic.earth), which is an independent scientific network with the vision of better understanding the Earth system in the Baltic Sea region as the basis for science-based management in the face of climatic, environmental and human impact in the region.
BALTEX was founded in 1993 after the rise of the Iron Curtain as a Regional Hydroclimate Project (RHP) within the Global Energy and Water Exchanges Project (GEWEX) of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). Scientists from 14 countries covering the watershed of the Baltic Sea reforged connections between the research communities from the east and the west. As the focus was to understand the hydrological cycle and the exchange of energy between the atmosphere and the Earth surface, data from the entire watershed region were collected which required an exchange of data between countries.
In 2013, after 20 years of successful research networking the program was relaunched and renamed to Baltic Earth, with a revised and extended science plan. Baltic Earth has a more holistic view of the Earth system compared to its predecessor encompassing processes in the atmosphere, land, sea, and anthroposphere. The aim is to understand the entire Earth system in the Baltic region and to investigate the effects of all relevant drivers on it. Over the years, a very active network of scientists from all Baltic Sea countries has been built up, with its own infrastructure, including the BALTEX/Baltic Earth secretariat, conferences, workshops, ambitious educational program and publication series.
Activities
Current Baltic Earth activities can be divided into the following categories:
- Networking: Baltic Earth promotes dialogue between scientists in the different Baltic Sea countries and between the network and similar scientific activities worldwide. Baltic Earth organises a) biennial conferences at changing locations in the Baltic Sea region, b) workshops on current scientific topics, including emerging challenges, c) working groups focusing on specific scientific topics of the Baltic Earth science plan, e.g. with the aim of writing an overview article or developing new topics for a revision of the science plan, and d) a scientific colloquium that takes place regularly online every two months.
- International cooperation: Baltic Earth promotes exchange between scientists in the Baltic Sea region and other international organisations and networks. Examples of this are the various WCRP programmes such as GEWEX (Baltic Earth is part of GEWEX as RHP), the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX, e.g. through participation in its ocean task force) and Med-CORDEX (two joint workshops were organised). In addition, Baltic Earth scientists contributed to the Knowledge Hub on Sea Level Rise organised by the pan-European joint programme initiatives, JPI Oceans and JPI Climate.
- Assessment reports: Scientists from Baltic Earth and its predecessor organisation BALTEX have produced three comprehensive status reports on past and future climate change in the Baltic Sea region. The first two were published as textbooks in 2008 (BACC I) and 2015 (BACC II), while the third report was published as a special issue of a scientific journal with 10 review articles (BEARs). These assessment reports fill gaps in knowledge about regional climate change and its consequences that global status reports cannot.
- Stakeholder cooperation: Baltic Earth has worked with several international organisations, but most intensively with the Baltic Marine Environment and Protection Commission (Helsinki Commission, HELCOM). HELCOM uses the climate information from the assessment reports to take climate change into account in its policies. Recently, a joint expert network on climate change (EN CLIME) was established. This network aims to regularly produce climate change factsheets to inform stakeholders and the public.
- Education: Baltic Earth regularly organizes summer and winter schools for master and PhD students, respectively. Furthermore, a hybrid (face-to-face and online) master course on the climate of the Earth system at Rostock University is open for all interested students from Baltic Earth. Most of the courses are certified so that students in different countries can have European credits recognized. The summer school, which always takes place on a specific Swedish island, was held for the 10th time this year. The students who have taken part in Baltic Earth's courses now make up a large proportion of the participants in conferences and workshops.
Future challenges
In the future, Baltic Earth may face the following challenges.
Baltic Earth is like a club and the membership fee is the personal involvement of its members in the activities. This idea collides with the working conditions at many institutes where research is paid for solely from third-party funds, leaving no time for voluntary research community activities and service to society. As Baltic Earth has no own resources, except for the international secretariat, scientists from some institutes cannot join such activities anymore. In order to counteract this development, one measure would be to acquire larger joint collaborative projects for Baltic Earth's partner institutes.
In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, national and institutional restrictions in EU countries require that scientists and students affiliated at Russian and Belarusian state institutes are currently excluded from participation in any of the Baltic Earth events. This means that the situation after 2022 has returned to an era with limited scientific exchange, affecting many of the Baltic Earth activities. Peace is therefore essential so that good scientific cooperation between the east and the west can be rebuilt again.
For the next 5 years, starting in 2025, the international Baltic Earth Secretariat will be led by two secretaries at a Polish (IOPAN) and a German (IOW) institute, after the German institute Hereon in Geesthacht has supported the Secretariat for more than 30 years. The intended more intensive German-Polish cooperation within Baltic Earth will hopefully lead to a strengthening of Baltic Earth as a whole, so that the network will continue to exist in the future and be able to build the research capacity in the Baltic Sea region and advise stakeholders such as HELCOM.