Denmark's marine plan, which was launched shortly before the summer holidays, has good intentions, but also major shortcomings. As several experts have previously described, the interaction between sea and land is completely missing in the marine plan, and everything about environmental conditions – including the Water Framework Directive – is in other plans and strategies.

The EU's Water Framework Directive is the basic law of water. It must protect a good ecological and chemical condition in, among other things. coastal waters throughout Europe. Nevertheless, a Danish marine plan is adopted in which these factors are not taken into account. A marine plan which, according to the government, must ensure more nature protection. Denmark should have met the targets for good condition as early as 2015, but was postponed until 2027. We will not achieve that either, but precisely for that reason it is extremely urgent to get the framework in place. The Danish maritime plan could have contributed to this – it does not.

Agricultural discharges are the primary reason why life in all the coastal waters is under pressure and in poor ecological condition. The Minister of the Environment agrees to this, at the latest in Politiken 23 August. Still, agricultural emissions are conspicuous by their absence in the marine plan. The emissions from land simply cannot be kept out of a marine plan, even if the government argues that other legislation, including the watershed plans, take care of the problem. But it has gradually been established that voluntary efforts have absolutely no effect.

Denmark is also very far from meeting the goal of good chemical condition. Actually is 85 percent of Danish coastal waters in poor chemical condition. Here, it is discharges of environmentally hazardous substances from shipping and waste water that lead to the greatest burden. This is not included in the marine plan either.

When it comes to waste water, there are no limit values ​​for how large concentrations of chemical substances may be in the waste water itself. Instead, from the EU's side, there are limit values ​​for what must be in the water environment to which it is discharged. This means that, in the worst case, you can dilute yourself out of the problems. Danish sewage treatment plants are built to clean the waste water of nutrients and organic matter - not of environmentally hazardous substances. Measurements shows that via waste water, streams and the air we pollute the sea with e.g. PFAS, drug residues and pesticides. And this is just a small sample of the many types of environmentally hazardous substances that can end up in the water environment around us. Not all are harmful, but many are. And this can have major consequences for our marine environment, as the chemicals destroy ecosystems and end up in fish and shellfish - and then in humans via consumption.

In March last year, a group noted researchers at DTU, together with several foreign researchers, that we have no control over the consumption of chemicals, which threatens ecosystems around the globe. On the basis of their research, they urged politicians in Denmark and the rest of the world to take the chemicals area much more seriously. Yet the politicians do nothing. We can only support the call to action. Far too many chemicals are discharged into the Danish water environment. And a sea plan simply must not sit on the sidelines of this crisis. We cannot try to correct the state of the sea with some protected marine areas alone. If we continue the discharge of pollutants from land, it will suffocate many of the intentions that one must assume the marine plan has after all in relation to securing the state of the sea in the long term.

A strengthened interaction between sea and land is needed. Problems we create on land must not end up in the sea.

This debate entry was written by Lone Mikkelsen and was published in Politiken on 25 August 2023.