Algae blooms have been present in the Baltic Sea for a long time, but they have not always been a regular feature in the broader cultural and social imaginations that exist in and around the Baltic Sea Catchment Basin. That people in Sweden know and care about algae blooms today partially stems from the foundation of HELCOM (an intergovernmental organization tasked with protecting the Baltic Sea) in 1974 and the large algae blooms of 1988. Of course, earlier algae blooms have also been important, including blooms from around the 1920s or 30s that caused an illness reportedly known as Haff-sjukan.
To a certain extent, therefore, my research attempts to contextualize or historicize this interest in algae blooms, but it also seeks to understand how people experience, relate to, communicate about, and value algae blooms and their causes and effects. Some research I’ve done up to this point explores how monitoring algae blooms came into being, how monitoring takes place, and in what ways monitoring efforts communicate contamination and disgust. Also, an article that I’ve recently published, “Are Dead Zones Dead?: Environmental Collapse in Popular Media about Eutrophication in Sea-based Systems,” tells a story about how different understandings of algae blooms in the Baltic Sea contribute to alternate ways of conceptualizing the health of the Baltic Sea, in this case, whether as collapsing or collapsed.
It was a pleasure to share some of this work I’ve been doing with colleagues and other scholars for my mid-seminar. Invited discussant, Heather Anne Swanson from Aarhus University detailed her thoughts on my work with algae blooms and my ongoing efforts. She gave me some really good advice along with others in attendance. I learned a lot from everyone who was involved and would be happy if any readers of this blog would like to contribute or share their experiences related to algae blooms with me as well. For example, I’ve had a difficult time finding out detailed information on Haff-sjukan. But, of course, I’d be just as interested in your latest sailing adventure or your own research that relates to eutrophication, algae, or de-oxygenated marine environments (sometimes known as bottendöd or “dead zone”). Please email me if you’d like: jessep@kth.se.
Besides addressing the questions and comments given to me at the seminar, I hope to research differences in the cultural values given to algae and algae blooms and how nutrients become pollution among other issues.
Scholars at KTH research waters and what happens in them in all sorts of ways. I am happy to be part of this diverse group and hope that my research will shed further light on the social and cultural relationships that people develop with algae blooms in the Baltic Sea.
The short homemade video below shows a couple of spotted garden eels in action. You can go visit them yourselves, like I did, at the Aquaria Water Museum in Stockholm (which unfortunately closes down for good during 2018, so hurry!). Garden eels live in colonies of up to thousands of individuals on sandy bottoms in tropical and subtropical waters. They dig a burrow, hide about two thirds of their body (the fish is up to 40 cm long and 14 mm in average diameter) and peek up to catch foods that pass with the current. They apparently stay in the same burrow their whole life (except when mating when they move their burrow closer to a partner’s burrow).
Video: Lina Isacs
The garden eel above is in this text for two reasons: 1) I had no other water-related picture at hand when I sat down to write, 2) the mere thought of it makes me happy. Having thought a while about whether these were good enough reasons, I realized they both might fit for illustrating the topic I’d planned to write about. We’ll see if you think the same.
The bread. Since many years back, I use to start a five-week course that I teach with the following experiment. It aims to make students get some of the main points of the whole course in about 45 minutes:
From a paper bag I pick up a freshly baked bread. I tell the students I’ve bought it the same morning from a local bakery with local ingredients from organic farming, and I pose this question: “What’s the value of this bread?”. The students are not silent for long but start asking immediately what I mean. “Value? What do you mean by value?”, and I use to answer as sweeping as I can and then, instead, I divide the students into three big groups, about 20 in each, and say, “You, over there, are to discuss what you think the bread is worth and decide collectively about its value, and then write the value down on this piece of paper”, which I hand them while continuing. “And you, here in the middle, you too will discuss the value together in your group, but then, without telling anyone else, write down the value yourselves, individually, on this piece of paper, along with your name. And lastly, you, over here, without talking to anybody about it, write down what you think the bread is worth, followed by your name.” To make it more fun I use to say they don’t have to use their true names if they don’t want to, just as long as they remember what name they used, which always seems to appeal to some of the most creative (I’ve had Sten Sture d.ä., Stevie Wonder and a few other celebrities in the classroom).
Then, before handing in the pieces of paper, I tell everyone to return to their seats, and say “Now, this time it’s an auction, where the one with the highest bid has to buy the bread from me, I mean – really”, and ever since the second time I did this experiment I always add that I mean it, for real, “Because, the first time I did this the students thought it was a joke, which it isn’t – you really have to pay the amount you state, if your bid is the highest.” They are then told to write down a value on the same pieces of paper, next to the figure they already have, without talking to each other, and that when they’re done, they are free to leave the room for the upcoming break, while leaving their paper piece to me on their way out. “The winner will be announced after the break.”
A moment of bewilderment (or excitement) then always follows, when the students look around at each other, laugh and fidget for a bit, before taking action, pressed by the 15 min pause looming.
During the pause, I prepare some statistics. In an excel sheet, I write down the bid of those who made a collective choice, make columns with each individual’s bid from the two exercises, and calculate the average from the three types of individual values I now have – the ones from those who made an individual choice after having talked to their group, the ones of those who didn’t talk to anyone before writing down a bid, and the bids from the auction, which includes everyone in the class.
After the break – when it’s unusually easy to get them back in the classroom – I show them the results, focusing on the differences between the four values, before revealing the winner.
Each year, the tendency is the same: the auction’s mean is always the lowest, between 1,5 and 2,5 times as low as the highest, and though not every time, the highest mean is often the bid made collectively.
So what do I want to say with this? I let them buzz in pairs a couple of minutes. Then they easily spot the traditional methodological problems of what environmental economists call “non-market valuation”:
The hypothetical setting makes people overstate the value.
For the collective value case, peer pressure makes people want to seem better than they are, especially if those with the loudest voice are strongly engaged in environmental issues (which most of these students are).
For the individual value cases, norms about that one should act environmentally friendly make you state a higher value than what you’re actually prepared to pay.
There’s a difference between “value”, “worth” and “what you want to or can pay in money”.
Some can’t afford to pay the amount they think the bread is actually worth.
At this point, I use to ask them what type of value the auction value is supposed to imitate, and when I say “the market value”, the discussion takes a bit of a turn, and to be honest I might use to talk a bit too much myself from then on. “The difference between the market price and the higher values you stated, what does it represent? What did you consider then that you didn’t consider during the auction?” If someone mentions “positive externalities” I use to think I’m superfluous, but things like “biodiversity”, “animal welfare”, “emission costs” impress. Some insights, however, needs a bit more time than what we have left of the lecture, and although I don’t think I ever manage not to at least try to, I use to spare the more philosophical reflections to later in the course.
The value of water. So what does this have to do with water? The thing is that I’ve done kind of the same thing in my research, but with “real people” and a real environmental problem. In my PhD project, we met stakeholders from the area called “8 fjords” at the Swedish west coast, where marine water quality has deteriorated severely during the last decades, which is closely linked to the local cod being nearly extinct. The project treats the question of how to describe the value of that which we value in nature, but which is hard to measure in classical value terms (money).
In this project, our case-study participants were first asked to state how much they would like to pay in tax per month to make a water quality improvement come true. They were then given the task to collectively decide about the relative importance of different values, such as future generations’ needs, preservation of species, private property rights, to take a few examples.
To make the story short, we really made an effort to counteract methodological problems like those listed above. Even so, the difference between what people perceive to be “the value” of something and what they include in an amount they are willing to pay was significant. Most importantly, not even their stated willingness to pay fully captured what they perceived as “the value” of the water quality improvement.
As obvious as this may seem to most, existing methods within “conventional” environmental economics nevertheless have problems taking this into account. And to me that is not so strange. How would you describe the value of the priceless, making it visible to decision-makers – consumers included – when evaluating or forecasting the environmental and social impacts of a project, or of a private enterprise?
That’s what I and many other environmental economists currently struggle with. Especially if you tend to be intrigued by the two sides of human nature – the one being lazy to the point of not even daring to search for a relevant photo to include in an article you’re happy to have been asked to write, and the one which is recurrently moved to tears by the mere knowledge that species like the garden eel exist and thrive; even species that you never even get to see.
Lina Isacs
Doctoral Candidate at Water and Environmental Engineering
Christian Pleijel reflects on a spectacular tour into the techno-mythical world of water on the island of Vis in Croatia.
The bay of Komiža with an old bunker and the entrance to the spring to the left
Vis, a Croatian island in the Adriatic Sea, 55 kilometers from the mainland, with an area of 90 km2. 3,460 persons live in the island’s two municipalities. Ten times the population comes to visit every year = 36,750 tourists, spending some 200,000 person-days on the island.
The pressure on the islands’ freshwater system (as well as the systems for energy distribution, sewage, solid waste, roads, ports, telephones, internet, transports, postal services and healthcare) from tourism is not so high, compared to most Mediterranean islands. The amount of water needed for the island can be estimated to 139,000 m3 (139 million liters) a year.
The islanders get their freshwater from two locations: five 160 metres deep drilled wells at Korita located in the interior of the island, and the fresh water spring called Pizdica which is located close to shore in the bay of Komiža, deep inside the 587 metres high mountain Hum.
To visit the source, you leave the road at a height of about 250 meters and descend on a pathway which becomes a serpentine trail down the mountainside. Getting more rugged, with simple stairs, plateaus, risk to slip and dope. There are wild roses, blackberries, hedge flowers, rosemary and St. John’s wort. Through many turns, bends and staggering dumps, you eventually land on a beach with decayed buildings.
Vis was a floating fortress with bunkers and caves for torpedo boats during Yugoslav time. No visits were allowed. The Pizdica source was the only known natural water resource of the island and therefore carefully guarded by the military, who had a posting here and carefully guarded it from attacks of all kinds. Two iron doors 50 meters apart close the double entrance to the spring, connected by a half-moon-shaped gallery, built to bear the pressure of a 500 kiloton bomb. A heavy steel door leads into today’s pumping room, where a small side door leads through a long narrow tunnel deep into the mountain, with the water pipe from the source on the floor. It is dark with simple lamps every ten meters. The passage turns once more. The pipe has taps into the mountain. You hear the water gurgle, and, after another bend, you are at the source.
The half-moon shaped gallery entrance and bomb-proof door
The tunnel
It is a small basin, 2 x 2 meter, one meter deep, giving 4 litres per second during summer, 3-4 times more winter time. The water is cold and clear and has a slight taste of salt.
It is spectacular. First the steep descent, then the jealous, oversized steel and concrete defense of the source, then today’s impressive engineering solution to extract the water of the source, finally at the bottom of the mountain the ancient, mysterious source, the holy origin of life. The Croatian word Pizdica literally means “small vagina” and the spring is referred to as the “pussy fountain”.
The source of Pizdica
We can choose to look at water from many angles. From an engineering point of view, drinking water is a precious provision which has to be found, extracted, purified and distributed among us humans. From a more poetic perspective, a freshwater spring is not only a subterranean spring but also a subconscious, important source of a myth, a legend, poetry, music, dreams and nightmares.
At Pizdica the myths seem to have combined in curious ways over time. Modern engineering ideals and military manifestations of dated geopolitics blend with traditional folklore echoing masculine dominance. Regardless what perspective we choose, the story of water on the island of Vis is one about a precious resource that needs to be safeguarded. Steel doors or not.
Christian Pleijel is Vice President of the European Small islands Federation. He works with leadership and development on island communities in Europe, including the challenge of water: https://europeansmallislands.com/water-saving-project/
Where nothing ever grows
No rain nor rivers flow
Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?
Photo: David Nilsson
I grew up with Band Aid and Bob Geldof. Their 1984 song ”Do they know it’s Christmas” is one of those soundtracks of my youth; the songs you’ve heard so many times that you’ve stopped listening. Like so many other everyday things, they blend into the wallpaper and you stop noticing what’s special about them.
But the other day, I accidentally really listened. Band Aid sings about starvation, vulnerability, and… water. The song came about to raise awareness, and above all money, for the famine in Ethiopia brought about by drought. Geldof and his friends did a lot to bring attention to the drought problem. But now more than 30 years later, water is still a huge global challenge. For reaching SDG6 on water and sanitation, drastic increases in capital and O&M expenditure will be needed if conventional technology (read piped water and water-borne sanitation) is to be employed. In 2016, a World Bank team calculated the annual investment need to around 200 Billion USD per year up to 2030. That requires a 300% increase of sector investments.
Clearly we need to rethink water and sanitation solutions to meet SDGs. As the head of UNESCO Irina Bokova pointed out recently, we need to engage science and innovation much more. Maybe we have just gotten so used doing things the same old way that we have stopped noticing that we could do things differently. Just like Bob Geldof’s song, our WASH technologies have blended into the wallpaper.
So how have we at WaterCentre@KTH confronted this need for innovation in the past year?
First of all we have tried to make our own university a more open place for the exchange of ideas, and water knowledge in general, with the surrounding society. We have organised meetings engaging with practitioners and entrepreneurs, with politicians and bureaucrats, with students and school kids, with other citizens and of course with other scholars. Examples are our lunch seminars, a science fair at the Nobel Museum, the seminar and workshops held in at our launch in March and of course, a website, our LinkedIn-network and this Blog. Our communicative efforts go far beyond the presentation of results. To make a difference in society, we must also listen and not just speak.
Exhibition at Nobel museum in June 2017. Photo: David Nilsson
Secondly, we have pushed for collaborations where our job is to create new and ‘crazy’ combinations of expertise. We have brought together KTH experts in business management, energy, nanotechnology, chemistry, biology and robotics, city planning, history, computer science and electronics… and yes; the occasional water engineer. All this to find new approaches to water challenges in society and “open up” designs that have been closed for a very long time. In our collaborative efforts we have worked together with our long-standing partners City of Stockholm, IVL, and SEI. We have also strengthened our relationship with a diverse set of organisations like Water Aid, Jehander AB, Värmdö municipality and Race for the Baltic.
Site visit at Jehander’s constructed wetland. Photo: Arifin Sandhi.
Thirdly, we have worked hard to leverage resources for innovation and research that will make an impact. Just like all researchers, we have submitted a string of applications as part of wide consortia and entered many other types of processes aimed for catalysing new research and innovation projects, in Sweden and globally. One of the positive outcomes of our catalytic work is a deepened collaboration with City of Stockholm around digitalisation in water and other infrastructure. Stockholms Stadshus AB – the holding company of the city’s utility companies in water, waste, energy, housing, ports, heating, and more – will finance a doctoral student at KTH in digitalisation and infrastructure with focus on water. This is a step towards a closer collaboration between the university and the city, and a model to ensure that we work towards societal goals.
Will this make a difference for the global challenges of water? Could a collaboration with Värmdö have any bearing on water shortage in Ethiopia? Yes it could. We are past the point in history when solutions are developed in the (post-)industrial North and then exported to the global South. As we have seen from other parts of industry, not least in mobile banking, ICT and mobility, solutions that develop in places like Kenya or India may well find a market in richer countries. Disruptive innovation in water or energy will affect us in the North as well as the South and we can learn from each other.
So as we move forward into 2018 looking for innovative, sustainable WASH solutions, the global outlook is with us also in the local setting. The importance is the quality of the cooperation and the trust we create in our partnerships. With that trust, we dare question things around us; the things that emerge out of the wallpaper; the things that we can change. And we can look into the future with curiosity and optimism.
Thanks for a fascinating 2017 – and wishing you all a Happy New Year!!
There I was on the island Vis far out in the Croatian archipelago, surrounded by beautiful turquoise water to participate in a workshop about water shortage on small European islands arranged by the Water Saving Challenge Project. Once again the same ingredients; a wicked problem, a diverse group of knowledgeable actors and the tension between holistic ambitions, and specific and localized solutions – they seem to attract my attention. Collaboration, cross-sectoral dialogues and broad participation are argued for as key measurements in almost all sustainable development policies. This seems logical given that the present complex challenges require combination of a diversity of knowledge, and multi-scale and multi-sector approaches. However, I think we have all been participating in too many workshops, discussing challenges, barriers and potentials, with a nagging feeling that it is not enough for the needed societal transformation. I was curious to find out if the workshop at Vis could be different.
The setting and process leadership are keys for successful collaboration and learning
Shortage of water is one symptom of our inability to handle water as a wicked problem, which has become an everyday reality for the inhabitants on many small islands. The task for the group of islanders gathering on Vis in September was to identify strategies to re-match water use with water availability but without losing sight of other important values such as a viable tourism providing jobs and income or local food production. What new ways of thinking, organizing and doing are needed to transform the water governance and how can the islands help each other?
Our process leader Christian Pleijel from the Kökar Island in Åland, works at KTH Executive School and is also the vice president of the European Small Islands Federation, used two tools to facilitate the discussions. The Ishikawa fish bone is designed to identify causes building up to a certain effect – in our case to identify all aspects of importance to achieve a water saving effect. The fishbone was combined with a method for parallel thinking by the use of six thinking hats developed by Edward de Bono. The thinking hats is a way to look at a certain issue from one direction at a time – the white hat as fact based and neutral, the red hat emotional, the black hat cautious, the yellow hat optimistic, the green hat creative and the blue hat organization. I had not before experienced these tools and looked forward to learn more about their potential.
However, what I soon discovered is that these are just yet another set of tools and with many similarities with tools that I have used or experienced in various collaborative processes before. It is not the tools that make a workshop contributing to real learning and change, it is the setting in which they are operationalised. What made this workshop a collective learning about island water saving was the stage, the actors and the process leader that used the tools.
The stage was very carefully designed based on extensive field studies on each of the eight islands represented. These field trips were as much about investigating the present water situation on respective island, as they were about establishing relationships and building trust that enabled the islanders’ engagement in the knowledge exchange and their support of a collective learning community. Furthermore, the stage is not just about what happens in the sessions which usually have a clear structure, roles and goals, but what happens in-between the sessions, during field-trips, coffee breaks and dinners. This is when new relationships are established that are necessary for future remote collaborations to be successful.
The importance of the space between sessions in a workshop. This is when relationships are built and long term learning partnership can start. A much appreciated visit to the Vis Island water center.
The actors also need to trust the process leader and each other in order to fully contribute to the joint process – the workshop play. Christian is himself an islander with personal experiences about what it means, combined with a long career working with people, leadership, innovations and businesses. In order to address wicked problems a diverse set of knowledge needs to be combined, demanding the process lead to be like a chameleon when interacting with this diversity. Like a director of a play you need to know when to start, stop, go back, fast forwarding by tweaking the tools so they are as purposeful as possible in relation to the process dynamic.
In the end fish bones covering many aspects of the water saving challenges on each island was drawn and the participants had been cautious, creative and emotional along the way with a strong foundation in facts and possible interventions in terms of governance. But, most importantly it was decided that this workshop was just the beginning of a more long-term exchange between the islands and that they will become learning labs to support a larger network of islands in the future.
What I bring with me from the three days with great islanders from all over Europe is that a workshop that enable not just knowledge exchange but real learning, needs to be carefully designed as part of a larger setting and requires deep skills in how to set a stage, encourage actors and use the right tools in the right moment. This might be common sense in other sectors but within sustainable development there is a clear need to highlight and develop skills in process design, leadership and facilitation so that we can move away from disappointing efforts of collaboration into meetings that enable societal transformation.
Sara Borgström
Assistant Professor, Strategic Sustainability Studies
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Readings: How to read an island by Christian Pleijel
Six thinking hats by Edward de Bono
Att leda samverkan: En handbok för dig som vill hantera komplexa samhällsutmaningar by Martin Westin, Camilo Calderon och Alexander Hellquist.
Author
Algae blooms have been present in the Baltic Sea for a long time, but they have not always been a regular feature in the broader cultural and social imaginations that exist in and around the Baltic Sea Catchment Basin. That people in Sweden know and care about algae blooms today partially stems from the foundation of HELCOM (an intergovernmental organization tasked with protecting the Baltic Sea) in 1974 and the large algae blooms of 1988. Of course, earlier algae blooms have also been important, including blooms from around the 1920s or 30s that caused an illness reportedly known as Haff-sjukan.
