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Overview

What is eutrophication?

Over 40% of the world’s population lives near the ocean, and coastal waters are increasingly polluted by nutrient runoff, specifically nitrogen and phosphorus, from wastewater and agriculture. This introduction of nutrients fuels large algal blooms, including those with toxic species, and their subsequent decomposition reduces oxygen levels creating ocean dead zones where fish and other organisms cannot survive.

People depend on ocean and coastal environments for enjoyment, recreation and tourism, but also to provide food. As a consequence, the social-economic implications of eutrophication are widespread. The first step in dealing with this issue is understanding the problem - with good information, eutrophication can be managed through improved policies and decision making, including the development of mitigation and prevention strategies such as increased waste water treatment, improved storm-water management and sustainable agricultural practices. But the tools required for eutrophication monitoring are often too expensive for nations with more limited scientific resources, meaning people in these places are left in the dark. Without timely access to monitoring data, it is impossible to advocate for improved policy and management and the problem worsens.

One of the recent global policy initiatives to address eutrophication is the creation of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14.1.1. In this initiative, United Nations Member States have committed to monitor and report on coastal eutrophication as an indicator to measure progress towards the goal of reducing the impacts of pollution on marine environments. A significant challenge for the accomplishment of this goal, however, is the complexity and prohibitive cost of the equipment and methods required for monitoring, making them ill-suited for developing states with limited resources. Additionally, with no internationally agreed-upon standards and methodologies, data that are collected are often of varying quality and are not comparable inhibiting a greater understanding of the state of the ocean across jurisdictions. This large-scale understanding of eutrophication is required to understand cumulative effects across the world.

A crucial first step in addressing this global issue is to provide data-poor regions with the tools they need to monitor eutrophication. This can be done through the development of functional, low cost kits that include all of the instruments needed to measure the effects of eutrophication. Searching for a low cost solution that works in various ocean environments across the globe is how the GEM initiative, and the GEM-in-a-box kits, came to life.

Establishing a Global Eutrophication Monitoring (GEM) Initiative

With a strong group of international partners, Canada, as a champion of the Commonwealth Blue Charter Ocean Observation Action Group, has established a Global Eutrophication Monitoring (GEM) Program. The first stage of this program was developing GEM-in-a-box kits composed of low-cost and robust instruments and methods appropriate for sustained eutrophication monitoring in under-resourced countries. The kits were developed to measure total inorganic nitrogen, phosphate, silica, turbidity, chlorophyll a, dissolved oxygen, conductivity and temperature, via discrete sampling methods. As a pilot study, participants were then chosen from across Africa, the Indo-Pacific and the Caribbean to attend an in-depth GEM training workshop and then take the kits and knowledge home to commence eutrophication monitoring programs in their countries. Learn more about the GEM-in-a-box pilot project.

Pending available funding, the objective of GEM is to continue to expand the deployment of these kits to under-resourced communities around the world allowing for the initiation of a network of monitoring programs. Locally, this monitoring data will help communities to assess the problem of eutrophication and make more informed, evidence-based decisions and globally, fill geospatial knowledge gaps in our understanding of the state of the ocean. High quality and comparable data is a key aspect of the project, with considerable efforts spent on selecting appropriate instrumentation, development of protocols and the development of pipelines to ensure that the monitoring data streams into public repositories. The datasets will then be able to address SDG 14.1.1., which calls for increased monitoring and mitigation planning to reduce nutrient pollution in coastal ecosystems.