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The MARE Research Program 1999–2006: Reflections on Program Management

Eutrophication in the Baltic Sea has been of great concern for the countries in the Baltic region at least since the 1980s. At the 1988 Ministerial Meeting of the Helsinki Commission, the ministers agreed to aim at a 50% reduction of total nutrient input to the Baltic Sea within a period of 10 years (1). In 1998, the ministers concluded that although the meeting in 1988 was the starting point for several actions, the 50% goal was not reached and eutrophication was still of great concern. They also committed themselves to develop joint cooperative research projects including models for decision support (2). This declaration from the Helsinki Commission, HELCOM, lead the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, MISTRA (3) to initiate the research program Marine Research on Eutrophication, a Scientific Base for Cost-Effective Measures for the Baltic Sea, MARE. The overall aim was to provide the Helsinki Commission with a user friendly, scientifically based decision support system as a tool for reducing effects of eutrophication (4). Six years after the start of the MARE program, the decision support system Baltic NEST (Box 1) is now used to assess measures against eutrophication by e.g. the HELCOM (5). In the Baltic Sea community, those years have been a transitional period of large political changes when Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland in 2004 became members of the European Union and the Baltic Sea became more or less an EU inland sea, with the exception of Russia. For us within MARE, the years of developing Baltic NEST have been a journey combining knowledge from the traditional scientific communities with the more operational demands of the managers and from originally developing a tool for HELCOM, which is now needed to analyze effects of implementing some EU directives as well. We have learned a lot from discussions with scientist and managers, we have found ways through scientific challenges, and we have had enjoyable moments. Here, we would like to share some of our experiences of managing a policy-directed interdisciplinary research program.