Location: Ozeaneum, Meeresmuseum, Stralsund Germany
Date: 5-6 November 2015
The Greener Agriculture for a Bluer Baltic Sea Conference (GABBS) has a long history of gathering key representatives from agricultural and environmental authorities, academic institutions, farmers' unions and advisory organisations, agri-environmental NGOs and enterprises providing an important opportunity for the sharing of ideas, solutions and collaborative approaches.
This year the conference is hosted by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in cooperation with the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA).
The theme of this year's conference is "Agricultural Production and Consumption - Mitigation potential to reduce eutrophication of the Baltic Sea", featuring the role and shared responsibility of actors throughout the production and consumption chain from farm to plate to help in reducing eutrophication of the Baltic Sea.
The conference is partly financed by the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management and supported by Swedish Agriculture University (SLU).
History of the GABBS conferences
The history of the conference goes back to 2009 when agricultural advisory organisations and farmers' organisations around the Baltic Sea initiated a new cooperation under the title Baltic Agreement. This lead to the international cooperation project Baltic Deal. The next year, Baltic Deal, WWF Baltic Ecoregion Programme and another large agri-environmental project part-financed by the EU Baltic Sea Region Programme, Baltic COMPASS, co-organised the first "A Greener Agriculture for a Bluer Baltic Sea" Conference in Helsinki. In Helsinki, WWF, with their WWF Baltic Farmer of the Year Award concept joined the organizing family.
Since then the conference has been held every year and two other large international agri-environmental projects Baltic Manure and BERAS Implementation have joined as co-organisers. National ministries and agricultural and environmental authorities of the host country, macro-regional organisations, associations and enterprises have played an important role in the event.
Report from 2014 conference
