Blue Nitrogen: A Nature-Based Solution in the Blue Economy as a Tool to Manage Terrestrial Nutrient Neutrality
Blue Nitrogen: A Nature-Based Solution in the Blue Economy as a Tool to Manage Terrestrial Nutrient Neutrality
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DOI：
10.3390/su141610182
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发表时间：
2022-08
期刊：
影响因子：
3.9
通讯作者：
Adam D. Hughes;George Charalambides;S. C. Franco;G. Robinson;P. Tett
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Adam D. Hughes;George Charalambides;S. C. Franco;G. Robinson;P. Tett
由于城市化程度的提高和相关的污水排放，人们越来越担心营养物质负荷的增加对水生生态系统和人类健康的影响。这导致了将土地利用变化或农业实践变化作为养分缓解战略的政策重点，但这些战略没有考虑到最终的下游接收环境，如海洋生态系统。在英国国内，人们越来越认识到，某些敏感地点的住房密度正在通过增加对海洋环境的营养负荷而影响海洋地物的保护状况。为了履行保护这些海洋地貌的法定义务，主管当局已要求开发商减轻这些额外营养物质的影响。目前的方法包括将农地转化为林地和湿地栖息地，这些栖息地释放的氮素比它们取代的农地更少。这种差异被用来抵消新开发项目带来的营养负荷，但这种以陆地为重点的基于集水区的质量平衡方法有许多局限性。英国目前的营养中性解决方案采取的是以陆地为中心的狭隘方法，未能认识到海洋环境对减缓营养丰富的潜在贡献。我们认为，基于海洋自然的解决方案提供了一种经济和生态上可行的替代陆地方案的方案，可以减少海洋环境中的氮负荷，增加生态系统服务的提供，并增加生物多样性。
There is growing concern about the impact of rising nutrient loading on aquatic ecosystems and on human health, due to increased urbanisation and associated sewage effluents. This has led to a policy focus on land-use change or agricultural practice change as nutrient mitigation strategies, but these fail to consider the ultimate downstream receiving environments such as marine ecosystems. Within the UK there has been increasing recognition that housing density in certain sensitive locations is impacting the conservation status of marine features, through the increase in nutrient loading to the marine environment. In order to comply with the statutory obligations to protect these marine features, the competent authorities have required developers to mitigate the impact of these additional nutrients. Current approaches include converting agricultural land to woodland and wetland habitats that release less nitrogen than the agricultural land they replace. This difference is used to offset the nutrient loading from the new development, but such a terrestrial-focused catchment-based mass balance approach has a number of limitations. Current solutions for nutrient neutrality in the UK take a narrow land-focused approach that fails to acknowledge the potential contribution of the marine environments to mitigate nutrient enrichment. We propose that marine nature-based solutions offer an economically and ecologically viable alternative to terrestrial schemes, that can reduce the nitrogen loading to the marine environment, increase ecosystem service provision and increase biodiversity.