The cities of Helsinki and Turku will update their joint Baltic Sea Action Plan during 2018. We will build on our tradition since 2007 of strategic water protection and our networking initiative, the Baltic Sea Challenge. We believe that local strategic action and encouraging other organisations to participate builds a wave of good deeds and best practices to improve the state from local waters to the whole Baltic Sea.

A decade ago in 2007 these cities wanted to be proactive and show that we can be exemplary in water protection and even gain competitiveness when investing in the good state of the local waters and the sea. Our first Baltic Sea Action Plan from 2007 had 40 actions to be implemented in the cities administration and with other co-operation partners, varying from point-source and scattered loading to clean shipping, awareness raising and international co-operation. Helsinki and Turku searched new ways of reducing our cities' various activities loading to the sea and means of being more water-protection oriented in our everyday actions. We also strengthened existing and created new co-operation with many other stakeholders, forming a new Baltic Sea Challenge network.

Helsinki and Turku are now implementing the second strategic Baltic Sea Action Plan until 2018, with a vision, five aims and 75 activities. Especially various agriculture, storm water, shipping and oil combatting related activities are well underway. We recently carried out a cost-benefit analysis on five local water protection measures, and the economic benefits can truly be found out and calculated. The coastal waters constitute the identity of the cities and have a lot of image building value. Cities have to consider the wellbeing of the marine environment to be a competitiveness advantage creating welfare to the city, its citizens, businesses and other actors dwelling here. Besides providing new marine districts to our cityscape we want to take the fragile sea into account when building new coastal areas or developing services. The increasing pressures to use the sea and improving the state of the marine environment have to be coordinated. We aim at clean coastal waters, healthy marine habitats, clean and safe marine traffic, systematic water area management and active Baltic Sea citizenship.

We wanted to encourage other organizations to participate in the strategic Baltic Sea work and established the Baltic Sea Challenge network, which nowadays includes 250 organizations from the countries around the Baltic Sea cities, non-governmental organizations, schools and universities, companies, regional authorities and so on. We support and advice our network members to create and implement their own strategic Baltic Sea commitments and action plans. We also provide opportunities for experience exchange with others to learn new practices, visibility, and build bridges between various public and private actors among the network. With dialogue and experience exchange the difficult questions can be broken down to pieces that fit everyones own organisation size and type. The Baltic Sea Challenge network is free of charge and open to all interested organisations.