New guideline launched for Arctic-specific risk assessment in shipping

A new Arctic-specific risk assessment tool for shipping has been released, something that the international experts behind it hope will become a building block for further knowledge sharing around maritime transportation in the North.

The Guideline for Arctic Marine Risk Assessment was put together by the Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response (EPPR) Working Group of the Arctic Council, an international forum made up of the world’s eight circumpolar nations: Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and the United States; and the six Arctic Indigenous groups; the Aleut International Association, the Arctic Athabaskan Council, the Gwich’in Council International, the Inuit Circumpolar Council, the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North and the Sami Council.

“The Arctic isn’t like anywhere else, but not everybody knows that,” Jens Peter Holst-Andersen, chair of the EPPR told Eye on the Arctic in a phone interview from Denmark.

Extraordinarily until now, marine risk assessments have been largely based on generic risk factors from around the world. And although regimes like the International Maritime Organization’s Polar Code outlines things like shipping structure and equipment requirements for operating in the Arctic and Antarctic – little has been done internationally to understand how Arctic-specific risk factors should be considered for northern maritime operations, despite shipping ramping up across the Arctic because of climate change.

To do the work, the Arctic Council’s EPPR combed through international risk assessment tools, data and methodologies from around the world and developed a list of ten missing Arctic Risk Influencing Factors (ARIFs) that should be considered when assessing shipping risk in the North.

“What’s important, is that when something goes wrong in the Arctic, the impact can be very different than if exactly the same thing happens somewhere else in the world,” Holst-Andersen said.

“If a ship runs aground further south, it’s often not a big issue,  there’s lots of infrastructure nearby and help is often not far away. But if exactly same thing happens in the Arctic, it could become a big crisis because help can be many, many hours away and there’s no infrastructure.”

Understanding Arctic complexity

Dan Cowan, Manager with the Canadian Coast Guard’s Response Directorate and Chair of the EPPR’s Marine Environmental Response Expert Group, says the guideline will also help people better understand the complexity of responding to environmental accidents in the North.

“Think of an oil spill,” Cowan said in a phone interview.  “If it happens in the Arctic at a certain time of the year, you may be dealing with it in 24-hour darkness, with any number of different ice conditions; pack ice, broken ice, there’s weather that could affect your equipment. The guideline we’ve put together ensures people are taking into account all those factors that may not otherwise be considered.”

The project was the brainchild of the Norway’s Coastal Administration, a body in Norway responsible for emergency preparedness, maritime safety, radio navigation, vessel traffic and coastal management, and was financed by Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Importance of Arctic collaboration

The guideline is free and available to anyone online. The tool walks users through six steps: Scope, context and criteria; and then risk identification, risk analysis, risk evaluation, risk treatment, and the report stage. It also provides links to data sets, web tools and best practices.

Cowan says the open data, shared experiences and transparency of the guideline are among its real strengths.

The EPPR group stresses that although the guideline may be of interest to captains, it is not a voyage planner or compliance tool, but rather something that could be used by national to regional administrations, NGOs, inter-governmental organizations or consultants.

“It could be governments, it could be coast guards working on strategies for storing environmental response equipment caches,” Cowan said. “But really this for anyone that has to factor risk-assessment into their work.”

Holst-Andersen said response to the guideline so far has been enthusiastic, and there’s already been questions about whether the guideline could be expanded to include things like search and rescue references or social and cultural risks to Arctic communities.

“This is where we started, but if there’s enough interest going ahead, of course we can be open to develop the guideline even further.”