Integrative approaches towards sustainability in the Baltic Sea Region

The challenges of sustainable development require that everybody, every institution and every nation work towards long-term strategies in order to move away from unsustainable practices. The same line of thinking applies to all nations around the Baltic Sea. A general challenge for the Baltic Sea region is to broaden the interest of people in discussions of national approaches supporting sustainability. Finding effective instruments to support the process of sustainable development in countries in transition with an emerging and largely inexperienced entrepreneur community and economically fragile, is as important as the promotion of long-term integrated sustainability strategies in countries which have well established democracies. The knowledge of the ongoing changes and the driving social, economic and ecological factors essential for the implementation of sustainable development in countries in transition must be broadened. A special need seen in the three Baltic countries -Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia - as elsewhere in the Baltic region, is the need to avoid development patterns of «business as usual» and to gain access to information and to advancements in sustainable development both in Europe and worldwide. The Baltic countries now joining the EU have to build capacity, for example by establishing teams of young researchers to draw up sustainable development strategies at the national level, which are consistent with European strategies. A bottom-up flow from the grass-root level is required to change the pattern of development strategies in the Baltic countries. The Conference «Integrative Approaches Towards Sustainability», whose experiences are documented in this book, was held on 26-29 March, 2003.