Swedish Government increases its support to the S2S Platform

The Swedish Government has committed to increasing its financial support to the Action Platform for Source-to-Sea Management (S2S Platform) to strengthen its important work on knowledge exchange and methodological development around land-based marine pollution. Karolina Skog, Minister for the Environment Sweden, announced the additional funding of 2 million SEK at the platform’s side event to the Ocean Conference on the 8^th of June 2017.  The S2S Platform, hosted at SIWI, thus gains a more important role in Sweden’s approach to tackling SDG 14 (Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development) and particularly marine pollution.

Marine pollution and plastic litter have gained a lot of media attention lately and have been at the heart of policy debates at the Ocean Conference. In his opening speech, UN Secretary-General António Guterres named pollution as one of three historic threats to the health of our oceans, and called for global action on the issue.

The S2S Platform is a multi-stakeholder initiative that enables experts from freshwater, coastal and marine backgrounds to collaborate on improving the management of water linkages from “source to sea”.

By linking multiple stakeholders, the S2S platform contributes to global knowledge generation on, among others, marine pollution. A recently published open access article, written in close collaboration with the platform, develops a possible framework for how to better understand, lead a dialogue on, and change management systems along key flows from source to sea. Explore more about the importance of the source-to-sea approach on our website or access the article on the Water Policy website.

Håkan Tropp, Director for Water Governance at SIWI, says: “This is a very timely support that will enable SIWI and its S2S partners to expand the initiative and the S2S approach. More than 80 percent of marine pollution and litter comes from land based sources, such as rivers and inadequate storm water drainage systems, and there is a strong need to identify pathways of pollution, from land to sea, using a Source to Sea Approach. But above all is there a strong need for concerted and integrated actions by decision-makers at all levels. The S2S Action Platform is an initiative for making this happen at a much larger scale.”