Policy Area Maritime Safety
Strengthening safe, resilient and sustainable maritime operations
To enhance maritime safety in the Baltic Sea, the Member States of the Strategy see the need to develop navigation, enable efficient traffic management, and ensure accurate preparedness and response for maritime accidents and security incidents.
The Baltic Sea is one of the world’s busiest and most sensitive maritime areas. High traffic volumes, evolving technologies, emerging fuels and increasingly unpredictable environmental conditions heighten navigational risks and place pressure on safety systems. Differences in national approaches to risk management, preparedness, search and rescue cooperation and competence development reduce coherence across the macro-region and limit the ability to prevent and respond to incidents.
Macro-regional cooperation strengthens shared understanding of risks, supports more consistent safety practices and enhances the capacity of authorities and stakeholders to address complex challenges.
What can we do together?
Macro-regional cooperation allows stakeholders and policymakers on all governance levels to share expertise, coordinate approaches and develop initiatives that would be more difficult to achieve individually or within national borders.
Policy Area Maritime Safety Coordinators pool resources and coordinate activities for the effective use of human and monetary resources in the Member States of the Strategy.
Policy Area Maritime Safety is coordinated by the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency (Traficom) and the Swedish Maritime Administration.
Enable reliable and safe navigation conditions
Why?
This Action calls for initiatives towards
• increased number of S-100 standards implemented in a harmonised way in the Baltic Sea Region
• increased number of countries completing BSHC (Baltic Sea Hydrographic Commission)-HELCOM resurvey, Category II
• improved national legislation to simplify bathymetric surveying. e.g. use of unmanned survey vessel (USV)
• more EU funding programmes tailored to foster innovations on enabling reliable and secure navigational conditions
• number of funding programs having projects supporting this action within the Policy Area Maritime Safety
• the maritime services proposed enable ships to carry more goods without increasing the risks, improving the factor of CO2/tonnes of goods
Develop navigation in ice to meet future challenges
Action 2 aims to improve the safety, efficiency and environmental sustainability of winter navigation through enhanced cooperation between relevant authorities, transport operators and research institutes.
To be a forerunner in digitalisation and automation.
Action 3 aims to focus on developing reliable and sound systems for maritime traffic management, including digitalisation and autonomous shipping. What is more, the action aims to develop maritime training and education in order to meet the future challenges.
Ensure accurate preparedness and response for maritime accidents and security issues.
Efficient search-and-rescue (SAR) and pollution preparedness and response (PPR) are essential functions to prevent loss of life or environmental damages. Therefore, Action 4 aims to reinforce these activities through improved cross-sectoral and cross border cooperation, including allocation of resources and transfer of knowledge between countries.