Annamari Arrakoski-Engardt is Secretary General at John Nurminen Foundation.
The article was first published in Mediaplanet supplement of Kauppalehti on June 25, 2015.

The objective of the NutriTrade project, led by the John Nurminen Foundation, is to launch the first nutrient trade system seeking to protect the Baltic Sea both on national levels in Finland and Sweden, and for the entire area of the Baltic Sea. The nutrient trade system can encompass any verified means with which the volumes of eutrophicating nutrients in the Baltic Sea can be reduced cost-efficiently and fast. The idea is to create a mechanism for identifying, financing and implementing such means. The project has been named one of the flagship projects of the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region.
A 2011 study sought to find out how much people were willing to pay for improving the status of the Baltic Sea in the various countries of the area. Swedes were the most willing to pay, with Finns in second place. What a person was willing to pay, on average, was highest in Sweden and amounted to €111. A Finn would pay €56 on average. This result is not a surprise: Finnish and Swedish swimmers, summer cottage owners and boaters are the ones who suffer most from the blue-green algae blooms every summer – and, consequently, would be the ones who benefit the most from measures that improve the status of the sea.
The greatest opportunities for reducing the load of the Baltic Sea fast can be located outside the borders of Finland and Sweden, i.e. in Poland with its large population, in Russia, in the Kaliningrad and Leningrad regions, and in the Baltic countries. Load is also generated outside the countries immediately by the sea, particularly in Belarus, from where nutrients, phosphorus and nitrogen flow to the sea via the rivers of Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.
Belarus is a great example of how we need to look beyond our own borders in the protection of the Baltic Sea. Why should a poor country, not on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and not a member of the EU or the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission, pay for improving the efficiency of wastewater treatment when the well-off Finland and Sweden are the countries that would benefit? These countries can use up hundreds of millions in the effort to curb the loads from their agriculture and point loads without achieving a visible result in the status of the sea. This is why cooperation beyond borders and sectors is worthwhile and even mandatory in the protection of the Baltic Sea. It is important to target our scarce resources to measures that are as cost-efficient as possible and reduce nutrient loads fast.
How does nutrient trade work in practice?
The NutriTrade project develops new, innovative ways to reduce the volumes of eutrophicating nutrients in the Baltic Sea.  Those who buy the discharges are volunteers who finance dedicated measures that reduce the nutrient load. Cities, municipalities, companies and individual citizens, for example, can neutralise their own phosphorus footprint by financing a target where nutrients can be removed as cost-efficiently as possible. The other party, i.e. the recipient of the funding, consists of stakeholders who are ready to reduce the nutrient loads to the Baltic Sea through their own, clearly measurable actions, but who lack the funding required for these actions. Such stakeholders can include water utilities, for example, who are willing to improve the efficiency of wastewater treatment beyond the required minimum. The City of Helsinki, for example, participates in the pilot where it can neutralise its own annual phosphorus discharges of 20–30 tonnes by supporting the reduction of a corresponding amount in Belarus.
In addition to improving the efficiency of water utility nutrient removal we have identified and verified several concrete measures that reduce the volumes of nutrients in the sea, such as, for example, mussel farming, treating fields with gypsum, and fishing cyprinid fish.
Plans are to launch the three-year project in the autumn of 2015, and continue until 2018. The project is led by the John Nurminen Foundation, and participants from Finland include the University of Helsinki and the Natural Resource Institute of Finland, and the Sustainable Seas Initiative and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences from Sweden.