A proactive approach for maritime safety policy making for the Gulf of Finland: Seeking best practices

Päivi Haapasaari, Inari Helle, Annukka Lehikoinen, Jouni Lappalainen and Sakari Kuikka

Marine Policy, 2015, vol. 60, issue C, 107-118

Abstract: A rapid increase in maritime traffic together with challenging navigation conditions and a vulnerable ecosystem has evoked calls for improving maritime safety in the Gulf of Finland, the Baltic Sea. It is suggested that these improvements will be the result of adopting a regionally effective proactive approach to safety policy formulation and management. A proactive approach is grounded on a formal process of identifying, assessing and evaluating accident risks, and adjusting policies or management practices before accidents happen. Currently, maritime safety is globally regulated by internationally agreed prescriptive rules, which are usually revised in reaction to accidents. The proactive Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) is applied to risks common to a ship type or to a particular hazard, when deemed necessary, whereas regional FSA applications are rare. An extensive literature review was conducted in order to examine the opportunities for developing a framework for the GoF for handling regional risks at regional level. Best practices were sought from nuclear safety management and fisheries management, and from a particular case related to maritime risk management. A regional approach that sees maritime safety as a holistic system, and manages it by combining a scientific risk assessment with stakeholder input to identify risks and risk control options, and to evaluate risks is proposed. A regional risk governance framework can improve safety by focusing on actual regional risks, designing tailor-made safety measures to control them, enhancing a positive safety culture in the shipping industry, and by increasing trust among all involved.

Keywords: Maritime risk; Oil transportation; Proactive; Risk governance; Shipping safety; Stakeholders; The Gulf of Finland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X15001621
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:marpol:v:60:y:2015:i:c:p:107-118

DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2015.06.003

Access Statistics for this article

Marine Policy is currently edited by Eddie Brown

More articles in Marine Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().