Baltic Sea Challenge

The work in project BEST is related to the Baltic Sea Challenge, coordinated by the cities of Helsinki and Turku. Baltic Sea Challenge (BSC) is a network initiative that invites organisations to commit in protecting the Baltic Sea and their local waters, to building their own Baltic Sea Action Plan and to implementing it. In 2018 there are already 270 member organisations in the BSC Network from the countries around the Baltic Sea. The network is free of charge and open to every interested organization committed to take concrete action to protect waters on a voluntary basis, exceeding the requirements of law and their own core operations.

We offer the members of the network e.g. support for creating concrete water protection measures, international framework for water protection plans, networking, visibility and exchange of experiences. Tools, good examples and implemented actions can be found in the Tools for water protection website. Welcome to the Baltic Sea Challenge network! Your organization can join here.

Read more: www.balticseachallenge.net, Twitter / @bsc_network

BSR WATER – Platform on Integrated Water Cooperation

As a lead partner of project BEST, City of Helsinki participates in the BSR WATER project, which is a platform project gathering together 7 EUSBSR Flagship projects and 10 partners. The BSR WATER Platform project is funded by the Interreg Baltic Sea Region programme and running from October 2018 to March 2021. It is coordinated by the Union of the Baltic Cities (UBC).

The idea of BSR WATER is to further develop and find synergies in outputs and results of the participating projects. Project BEST via its lead City of Helsinki participates especially in the BSR WATER work package “Facilitating the regional policy dialog on sustainable water management”, led by the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission, HELCOM. The work package contributes to long-term development of regional environmental policy and recommendations, which will further strengthen policy-practice link in implementation of advanced water protection measures, including smart nutrient management, sludge handling and storm water management. In this work package, BEST is particularly contributing to group of activity “Regional palette of solutions for P –recycling “.
In addition, City of Helsinki also participates in activities on stormwater management in work package “Developing policy recommendations for implementing sustainable urban storm water management”. This work is relevant for the City of Helsinki relating to the work of the former iWater project (on integrated storm water management).

Besides the policy recommendations, another aim of the BSR WATER is to develop the interactive Baltic Smart Water Hub online platform https://www.balticwaterhub.net/ . The Hub collects cases of best practices, technical solutions and tools developed in different water related projects. These cases cover four different water sectors: fresh water, seawater, wastewater and storm water. The aim of the Hub is to enable knowledge and expertise exchange.