Editing Pirates of the Baltic Sea (section)

==The Baltic Sea==

Large parts of the Baltic Sea used to freeze during winter, and during the harshest of winters the entire sea would be covered with ice. But the global warming that has happened by 2185 has made that past history. Now, the sea no longer has any ice, but has severe winter storms instead. The winter storms begin arriving in the region during October, and have caused numerous shipwrecks. They can be a threat to even larger vessels, and only a foolish captain will not pay close attention to weather forecasts.

Since 1992 an international convention, the Helsinki Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area, signed by all the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, has sought to prevent and eliminate pollution in order to promote the ecological restoration of the Baltic Sea Area and the preservation of its ecological balance. This has not been terribly successful. Baltic Sea naturally experiences algae growth in the summer months, but fertilizer runoff from surrounding agricultural land has exacerbated the problem to the point that the area of the bloom has extended from Germany and Poland to Finland. In the worst years, ship crews have felt as if they have been sailing on Sargasso Sea. And well over a quarter of the Baltic's seafloor is an oxygen-deprived dead zone where only bacteria can live.

Corporations care little for the state of the Baltic, and without the Convention the situation would most likely be extremely dire, but the governments have too much political capital invested into the Convention to abandon it, and the environmental struggle continues. A long ago proposed method to artificially oxygenate areas of the Baltic have recently started, with wind-driven pumps used to inject oxygen into deeper waters. Whether this will work, only time will tell. And what makes the effort difficult is that after World War II, Germany had to be disarmed and large quantities of ammunition stockpiles were disposed directly into the Baltic Sea. The presence of these munitions on the sea floor pose a significant hazard to any work done close to the seafloor.

===The Hanseatic Convention===

Baltic Sea does not have actual international waters. It used to be divided into territorial waters of the Baltic Sea states and their exclusive economic zones, with the EEZ of one state bordering that of another. In exclusive economic zones, there are restrictions on national jurisdiction and sovereignty, but the state still has special rights regarding the exploration and use of marine resources. The main difference to international waters is that ships sailing in the latter are generally under the jurisdiction of the flag state. However, when a ship is involved in certain criminal acts, such as piracy, any nation can exercise jurisdiction under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction.

With the rise of corporate power and the desire of megacorporations to free themselves from government oversight, the corporations operating in the Baltic Sea area started to resent the closed nature of the Sea, where they had to conform to the various laws and regulations of the Baltic Sea states. They felt especially chafed by the regulations that threatened them with costs. After much lobbying about the benefits of free trade and private treaties with various states, the megacorporations managed to muscle through the Hanseatic Convention, named after the Hanseatic League, a trade group that operated in the region from thirteenth century to seventeenth. According to the Convention, most of the area of the former exclusive economic zones were formed into a new Corporate Economic Zone. This meant that although the seabed remained in control of the states, the surface waters were a corporate-controlled zone where the sovereign states had no universal jurisdiction, effectively placing all corporate shipping outside the jurisdiction of the states until they entered the territorial waters. And since the corporations had private treaties with various states, in many cases this allowed them to do as they please.

In a textbook example of corporate short-sightedness, this brought into being something the Baltic Sea had not experienced in centuries – piracy. With no universal jurisdiction, the navies operating in the Baltic Sea had no authority to apprehend vessels beyond their territorial waters. Armed vessels started to prey on the shipping, some of them individual and others belonging to various groups. The pirate vessels operated from within the territorial waters of one state or another, some in secret and others semi-openly, when the sovereign states for one reason or another looked the other way as long as their own territorial waters weren’t violated.

The corporations swiftly amended the Hanseatic Convention to give the ships sailing in the Corporate Economic Zone the right to act against piracy. But the damage was done. The amendment had mixed responses. Many states felt that the corporations were shifting the costs to them while keeping the benefits. Nearly all navies respond swiftly to attacks on civilian or passenger vessels, but some come to the aid of corporate ships much slower or not at all. Others will ruthlessly pursue any ships engaging in acts of piracy.

The piracy continues to be a problem, and corporate vessels now routinely carry security teams on board, and are either themselves armed or have armed escorts, either corporate owned or mercenary vessels. To add to the mix, rival corporations sometimes hire privateers to harass the shipping of each other, and corporate hired pirate hunters prowl the waters where the navies are lax to protect the corporations.