Mapping the safety of navigation in UK waters

Abstract

Accidents involving vessels can result in loss of life, major pollution and economic impacts. Within the UK alone, the Marine Accident Investigation Branch record more than 1,000 incidents each year. Significant research has been directed at understanding how and where these accidents occur, in order to both prevent incidents and prepare to respond to their consequences. Yet, these studies are generally conducted at a local or regional scale and are therefore disjointed and incomparable, failing to recognise that shipping is international and cross-border. Furthermore, risk analysis are limited to local jurisdictions such as ports that are an inadequate spatial unit for national policy decisions. There is therefore a need to develop more robust national models of maritime risk.
Within this poster, the spatial distribution of maritime accidents and shipping activity are compared using a Geographical Information System. More than 10,000 accidents recorded between 2010 and 2020 by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch are analysed and clustering methodologies employed to identify hot-spots. These are compared to the density of historical transits as collected from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and other contributory factors such as ports and shipping lanes.
The analysis identifies clear hot-spots of collisions and groundings immediately adjacent to the UK's major ports, with few accidents occurring offshore, even in busy shipping lanes. From this, a risk management framework can be developed to optimise the allocation of mitigation, such as Search and Rescue assets, and to provide an evidence base for decision makers for marine spatial planning purposes.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Andrew, David Rawson: orcid.org/0000-0002-8774-2415

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