Frontiers Planet Prize 2023 National Champion of Finland

Tammeorg, Olga (Recipient), Tammeorg, Priit (Recipient), Kiani, Mina (Recipient), Horppila, Jukka (Recipient), Jilbert, Tom (Recipient), Hellsten, Seppo (Recipient), Härkönen, Laura (Recipient), Nurminen, Leena (Recipient), Ruuhijärvi, Jukka (Recipient), Kotamäki, Niina (Recipient), Silvonen, Soila (Recipient) & Ventelä, Anne-Mari (Recipient)

Prize: Prizes and awards

Description

The Frontiers Research Foundation has launched the Frontiers Planet Prize with the ambition to accelerate scientific solutions for healthy lives on a healthy planet. The ambition of the Frontiers Planet Prize is to directly address the planetary crisis, by mobilizing scientists engaged in breakthrough research, with the greatest potential to stabilize the planet’s ecosystem. Only inspired science, technological breakthroughs and widespread global action can spark off a green renaissance at the scale required.

Awarded date	22 Apr 2024
Degree of recognition	International
Granting Organisations	The Frontiers Research Foundation

Documents & Links

Winning article: Sustainable lake restoration: From challenges to solutions (WIREs Water, 2023) “Our research revolutionizes management approaches to nutrient pollution in lakes in a way that helps to keep the Planet within its boundaries” Lakes, ensuring food security, the provision of clean water for drinking and irrigation, recreation and biodiversity, have been centers for human life and activities for ages. The provision of these services is, however, dependent on the extent of the water pollution by major nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus, i.e. eutrophication. Eutrophication remains a main cause of water quality impairment in lakes globally. It is commonly recognized by unsightly and smelly scums of the blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) on the lake surfaces. These scums can be very toxic (known as harmful algal blooms), causing human health risks and compromising water use for drinking and irrigation. For example, drinking water crisis in Toledo on western Lake Erie (USA) in August 2014 interrupted water supply for about 0.5M people due to the high level of cyanobacterial toxins in finished water. Drinking water crisis in Wuxi (China) in 2007 affected about 4M people. Moreover, degrading blooms lead to oxygen depletion, siltation, massive fish mortality. Further economic losses are caused by high emissions of greenhouse gases (especially, methane) from eutrophic lakes. Over 40% of the world’s lakes (UN, 2021) are impacted. Yet, this value is underestimated, given that water quality remains unmonitored in regions with untreated wastewater. Also, freshwaters have the highest rate of biodiversity decline of all ecosystems. Thus, eutrophication leads to compromised ecosystem service delivery locally and affects economies and social stability globally. The extent of eutrophication is projected to double in response to climate change and population growth, leading to methane emissions from lakes and reservoirs more than 50% of current fossil fuel emissions. The substantial accumulation of nutrients in watersheds (legacy nutrients) will continue to damage ecological health in lakes for decades to come if left unmanaged. These challenges trigger a need for drastic changes in the existing approaches to eutrophication management. Sustainable lake restoration is our overarching solution to eutrophication, aiming to improve ecological state while delivering a number of other environmental and socio-economic co-benefits extending beyond the scale of intervention. We are developing numerous tools based on decades of expertise in lake restoration science, in order to reach a synergetic solution that is effective both environmentally and economically and crucially, that supports nutrient recycling, reuse and recovery (circular economy). For example, sediment removal from lakes may decrease nutrient concentrations and cyanobacterial blooms, leading to reduced greenhouse gases emissions, increased amenity and recreation value. At the same time, the sediment removed can be used as a fertilizer, improving situation with non-renewable phosphorus rock (P rock) availability and prices. Very narrow circle of countries control economically reasonably exploitable P stocks, namely Morocco, USA and China, with the latter two having already minimalized the exports. The P rock stocks controlled by Morocco tend to have higher content of cadmium and other heavy metals, but are also affected by the political instability around P-rich Western Sahara (the sole African colony according to UN). The situation with P rock availability and price has only worsened since 2022 with the Russian military aggression on Ukraine and the following sanctions to Russia and Belarus to the point where food security becomes jeopardized globally. Each lake should be assessed individually to ensure best solution to the lake-specific problems. In general, we promote combined approaches including reduced nutrient inflow from catchments as well as in-lake measures (addressing nutrient release from sediments). We develop and enhance tools enabling to quantify the impacts of different interventions on lake nutrient concentrations, to establish linkage with the potential environmental and socio-economic benefits. The overarching solution we propose is global in scale, but delivered through a network of local-scale actors. For example, reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases in thousands of individual lakes directly impacts local communities and stakeholders in each case (improved lake ecosystem health), but also contributes directly to carbon cycling on the global scale (reduced emission of greenhouse gases). Individual stories of restoration success at local scale act as beacons and can be communicated regionally and internationally as a showcase for tailoring site-specific solutions. Civil society is not a passive observer in sustainable lake restoration, but rather is actively involved in developing, implementing and benefiting from its solutions. This is an important aspect of the new-generation water quality management strategy. We underline that achieving optimal, sustainable results from lake restoration relies on multidisciplinary research and close interactions between environmental, social, political, and economic sectors. In 2023, the outcomes of our paper were included in a White Paper on Embedding Lakes into the Global Sustainability Agenda to raise awareness on the benefits of sustainable lake management to the global restoration community. This White Paper was launched by the United Nations Environment Programme at the UN Water Conference, New York, 2023 and is being used to inform the implementation of a United Nations Environment Assembly Resolution 5/4 on Sustainable Lake Management (UNEP/EA.5/Res.4), reaching all UN member states. We now work through our international partnership to enable transformative change in this field. Our solution will support Target 2 of the Biodiversity Plan For Life on Earth aiming at restoring 30% of all Degraded Ecosystems by 2030.

Frontiers Planet Prize 2023 National Champion of Finland

Description

Documents & Links

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Research output

Sustainable lake restoration: From challenges to solutions