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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how change is brought about in quality governance of Baltic maritime oil transportation. Design/methodology/approach – This qualitative case-study sought to understand the underlying mechanisms of quality governance. The paper analyzed versatile empirical material (including expert interviews) to uncover how a particular constellation of public and private, binding and voluntary, internal and external quality standards impacted the process of institution building for quality management in Baltic oil shipping. Findings – The paper shows that emergence of quality practices in oil shipping is associated not only with the development of shipping industry as a whole, but also with the dynamics within the energy value chain. The findings suggest that alignment between rules and incentives is specific to a combination of given natural, political and economic contexts as well as physical infrastructure which set applied limitations upon the governance process and, eventually, impact the set of quality governance mechanisms available for use. Research limitations/implications – The paper shows that collective action is contextually-bound, thus the mechanisms of quality shipping governance can essentially differ from one locality to another. This implies that local solutions can be found to problems conventionally identified as global. Practical implications – Paper’s findings question the applicability of “one-size-fits-all” approaches to policy-making and calls for more targeted regulation. The research also stresses the role of technical modernization in prompting actual change in regards to quality practices. Originality/value – This research claims that transition to sustainable transportation systems requires institutions that are capable of linking actors and contexts in a way that balances supply and demand for quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the first ever so-called 'macroregional strategy' developed under the aegis of the European Commission: the European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR). Through a drawing together of elements of actor-network theory and regionalization theory, it is argued that the adoption of the EUSBSR can be seen as a milestone within a wider process towards Baltic Sea regionalization, whereby the Baltic Sea region is increasingly 'solidified' through the positioning of the European Commission as a spokesperson for the interests of the region. It is further suggested that, if not seriously contested, the possible acceptance of the European Commission as a designated regional spokesperson might be a crucial step in a process whereby the soft space of the Baltic Sea Region may gradually become more formalized. Nonetheless, caution must be taken so as not to confuse degrees of formal institutional fixity with degrees of durability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Helsinki Commission Red List project 2009-2012, taxonomic and distributional data of benthic (macro) invertebrates were compiled by the present authors in a comprehensive checklist of the Baltic Sea fauna. Based on the most recent and comprehensive data, this paper presents the diversity patterns observed among benthic invertebrates in the Baltic Sea. As expected, the total number of species per sub-region generally declined along the salinity gradient from the Danish Straits to the northern Baltic Sea. This relationship is well known from the Baltic Sea and has resulted in a general assumption of an exponentially positive relationship between species richness and salinity for marine species, and a negative relationship for freshwater species. In 1934, Remane produced a diagram to describe the hypothetical distribution of benthic invertebrate diversity along a marine-freshwater salinity gradient. Our results clearly indicated the validity of this theory for the macrozoobenthic diversity pattern within the Baltic Sea. Categorisation of sub-regions according to species composition showed both separation and grouping of some sub-regions and a strong alignment of similarity patterns of zoobenthic species composition along the salinity gradient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Geografija is the property of Lithuanian Academy of Sciences Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Our paper is concentraded at the scientific description and analysis of Baltic Sea region tourism potential. It bases on statistics of eight EU countries from the period of 2000-2009 and potential analyse of 2010-2011. It shows the influence of EU development, currency exchange rate and impact of the economic crisis of the years 2000-2009 on number of ferry tourism movement. It shows how the wrong preparation for the transport situation prevailed in the study area can reduce the competitiveness of shipping ferry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU enlargement brought the Baltic Sea into the sphere of EU environmental policymaking, making the sea, with the exception of Russia, an EU inland sea. Yet, the state of the Baltic Sea environment is deteriorating at an alarming pace. This paper describes the evolution of the EU governance of the Baltic Sea environment, focussing on governance barriers. The findings demonstrate how the choice of analytical lens influences the construction of governance barriers and the respective intervention strategies. Such understanding can help policy practitioners in their search for successful measures to improve the governance situation in the Baltic Sea region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses long-term perceptions and meanings of coastal landscapes, particularly of coastal islands, in the northern Baltic Sea region from the Neolithic to the early modern period. Instead of identifying specific meanings attributed to particular landscape elements, the aim here is to explore similarities and continuities in the ways of relating with coastal landscapes across centuries and millennia, with an emphasis on how meanings of coastal landscapes and broader cosmological concepts would have been linked to environmental changes stemming from post-glacial land uplift and associated processes. While some socio-cultural impacts of land uplift have been addressed especially in the context of Stone Age archaeology, the broader and longer-term implications of living in dynamic coastal to environmental perception and cosmological concepts remain to be appreciated. A series of interlinked cases from the Neolithic to the early modern period will be employed to discuss those wider issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surveys were conducted in ten schools: five in locations around the Baltic Sea and five around the Mediterranean. Students were asked to delimit the two regions on a map of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, to assess how much they would like to live in each region, and to write down the advantages and disadvantages associated with living in each region. Students tended to describe the two regions in terms of a North–South dichotomy, describing the Baltic Sea region as cerebral, advanced, and wealthy, while culture, food, and climate were described as advantages of the Mediterranean region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the local and transnational entanglements of interwar liquor contraband operations to show how smuggling in the Baltic Sea region grew from small-scale coast-to-coast operations to a large-scale trade organized by transnational syndicates moving millions of liters. It examines transnational smuggling networks, the use of flags of convenience and large base ships to argue that the framework of the "Helsinki Convention for the Suppression of the Contraband Traffic in Alcoholic Liquors of 1925" led to professionalization and trans-nationalization of contraband operations and a significant growth in liquor smuggling. The analysis of the Free City of Danzig (Wolne Miasto Gdansk), where the boundaries between small-scale smuggling and professional contraband operations were fluid, provides insights into the local elements of liquor smuggling operations. This part of the argument focuses on the weak governmental control and the tax-free area in the Danzig port, which provided the necessary infrastructure for large-scale smuggling and enabled the city-state to become a major hub for liquor smuggling operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Achieving good environmental status in the Baltic Sea region requires decision support tools which are based on scientific knowledge across multiple disciplines. Such tools should integrate the complexity of the ecosystem and enable exploration of different natural and anthropogenic pressures such as climate change, eutrophication and fishing pressures in order to compare alternative management strategies. We present a new framework, with a Baltic implementation of the spatially-explicit end-to-end Atlantis ecosystem model linked to two external models, to explore the different pressures on the marine ecosystem. The HBM-ERGOM initializes the Atlantis model with high-resolution physical-chemical-biological and hydrodynamic information while the FISHRENT model analyses the fisheries economics of the output of commercial fish biomass for the Atlantis terminal projection year. The Baltic Atlantis model composes 29 sub-areas, 9 vertical layers and 30 biological functional groups. The balanced calibration provides realistic levels of biomass for, among others, known stock sizes of top predators and of key fish species. Furthermore, it gives realistic levels of phytoplankton biomass and shows reasonable diet compositions and geographical distribution patterns for the functional groups. By simulating several scenarios of nutrient load reductions on the ecosystem and testing sensitivity to different fishing pressures, we show that the model is sensitive to those changes and capable of evaluating the impacts on different trophic levels, fish stocks, and fisheries associated with changed benthic oxygen conditions. We conclude that the Baltic Atlantis forms an initial basis for strategic management evaluation suited for conducting medium to long term ecosystem assessments which are of importance for a number of pan-Baltic stakeholders in relation to anthropogenic pressures such as eutrophication, climate change and fishing pressure, as well as changed biological interactions between functional groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weather Research and Forecasting atmosphere model and Finite Volume Community Ocean Model were for the first time used under the pseudo-climate simulation approach, to study the parameters of an extreme storm in the Baltic Sea area. We reconstructed the met-ocean conditions during the historical storm Gudrun (which caused a record-high +275 cm surge in Pärnu Bay on 9 January 2005) and simulated the future equivalent of Gudrun by modifying the background conditions using monthly mean value differences in sea surface temperature (SST), atmospheric air temperature and relative humidity from MIROC5 in accordance with the IPCC scenarios RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 for 2050 and 2100. The simulated storm route and storm surge parameters were in good accordance with the observed ones. Despite expecting the continuation of recently observed intensification of cyclonic activity in winter months, our numerical simulations showed that intensity of the strongest storms and storm surges in the Baltic Sea might not increase by the end of twenty-first century. Unlike tropical cyclones, which derive their energy from the increasing SST, the extratropical cyclones (ETCs) harvest their primary energy from the thermal differences on the sides of the polar front, which may decrease if the Arctic warms up. For climatological generalizations on future ETCs, however, it is necessary to re-calculate a larger number of storms, including those with different tracks and in different thermal conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Mineral Resources Management / Gospodarka Surowcami Mineralnymi is the property of Mineral & Energy Economy Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Estonian Journal of Earth Sciences is the property of Teaduste Akadeemia Kirjastus and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The concept of ‘information costs’ has attracted attention as a means of understanding economic dynamics. In the early modern trade economy, the costs of maintaining business correspondence were an important part of information costs. In this article, the Swedish general postage tariff (used in 1693–1747) is analysed in order to reveal the geographic pattern of information costs, measured as postage. It is shown that central parts of Sweden benefited, including the iron-producing regions and its export harbours, while important trade ports in the eastern parts of the empire faced high costs even though Sweden claimed control over large parts of the Baltic Sea area up to 1721. Swedish correspondence with western and southern Europe carried lower costs than correspondence with eastern Europe. This was an effect of a tariff constructed on postage-per-distance and of letting profitable lines subsidise a dense, territorial postal network. Sea post became particularly expensive as the volume of letters was too small for effective use of the post ships' carriage capacity; this challenges the view that early modern commercial networks were connected by sea since transport on sea was superior to land-bound transport. Transfer of information was often better provided on land. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sediment samples were collected in two Polish ports of international significance-the Port of Gdańsk and the Port of Gdynia (Gulf of Gdańsk, Baltic Sea)-in order to assess their butyltin and phenyltin contamination; this was done in 2008, just after the total ban on using harmful organotins in antifouling paints on ships came into force. Altogether, 21 sampling stations were chosen to present a diversity of port sites: from port canals and shipyards to anchorages and dumping sites. The organic carbon content and grain size of all the sediment samples were determined, and some environmental parameters (oxygen content, salinity) were measured as well. Total concentrations of butyltin compounds in sediment samples were very different and ranged between 1 and 18,520 ng Sn g d.w. Phenyltin contents were distinctly lower and ranged from below the limit of detection (most samples) to 660 ng Sn g d.w. The highest concentrations of organotins were found in the shipyards, the maximum total organotin content (19,180 ng Sn g d.w.) being found in the Gdańsk Ship Repair Yard 'Remontowa'. Butyltin degradation indices indicate a recent tributyltin input into the port sediments. The results obtained from this work prove that the international ban on using organotins may not be enough to protect the marine environment. It is necessary to monitor organotin contamination in ports and establish concentration limits of these compounds for the disposal of dredged material at sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessment of the ecological status of an aquatic environment according to the European Union Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires the determination of a link between the observed status of the marine ecosystem and catchment loading as well as the establishment of criteria for ecological status definitions. This article presents the results of a study identifying links between environmental pressures in the Polish sector of the Baltic Sea and state parameters applied in the assessment of eutrophication. Strong, statistically significant correlations were found between riverine loads of nutrients and their marine concentrations even in relatively short time data series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires ecological status quantification on the basis of biological and physico-chemical parameters, and an assessment of reference conditions and relevant environmental pressures for the construction of response curves. In this study the linking of water transparency, a proposed eutrophication indicator, to environmental pressure parameters was examined in the Polish sector of the Baltic Sea. Statistically significant linear correlations were detected between nutrient concentrations in sea water and Secchi depth, and between nutrient riverine loads and Secchi depth. The magnitude of acceptable deviation from reference conditions is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To implement the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) it is necessary to establish tools enabling ecological status quantification on the basis of biological indicators, and to assess reference conditions and relevant environmental pressures for the construction of response curves. This study focuses on the Polish sector of the Baltic Sea. A number of statistically significant linear correlations, linking chlorophyll-a concentrations with pressure parameters, were found. Due to the lack of historical data, reference conditions and ecological class boundaries for chlorophyll-a assessment were determined using a simplified mathematical approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]