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J. Murawski and J. Woge Nielsen
11.1 Introduction
The ever-increasing density of maritime traffic and especially tanker traffic contributes strongly to the possibility of shipping accidents with the consequence of
near-coastal oil spills. As described in previous chapters, model-based investigations
of various risk factors have been used successfully to minimize the consequences of
shipping disasters and to increase the efficiency of fairway designs. Economical
and environmental factors are thereby fundamentally non-conflicting. In the process
of making shipping routes safer and environmentally friendlier by adaptive design,
they often become more beneficial in terms of faster travels (e.g., going with the
currents instead of against them, Lo and McCord 1995; McCord et al. 1999) and
lower fuel consumption (Lo and McCord 1998; Christiansen et al. 2004). Environmental and economical considerations are, however, rarely entering the planning
stage of fairway designs (Stokstad 2009) although model-developed design criteria can obviously contribute to optimized sea traffic, e.g., by effective route planning, emission reduction, improved disaster management or increased performance
of transport vessels.
Disaster management in the marine environment is largely understood as a response action to accidents. In particular, the partial goal to manage maritime pollution still is to develop remedial action plans (e.g., Keramitsoglou et al. 2003).
There is, however, an increasing tendency towards planning and developing various
preventive measures (Delpeche-Ellmann and Soomere 2013). These efforts aim at
bridging the gap between the economical and environmental factors by means of including potential environmental losses into the risk equation (see Chap. 1). The final
goal is to build a combined platform of coupled forecasting models for the atmosphere, waves and ocean circulation, which feed the relevant information concerning
the drift and fate of pollutants at sea into the disaster impact model, and develop a
suitable quantification of the relevant risks and costs for ship routing services and
fairway performance analysis.
The efforts in this direction described in the previous chapters were targeted at
the evaluation of fairway and sailing line design under safety, risk, disaster impact
and ship performance viewpoints combined with certain environmental criteria. The
analysis was based on the idea of highlighting the potential of semi-persistent (but
still statistically significant) current patterns and current-driven oil drift characteristics in the risk for coastal areas. In regions where the oil propagation is heterogeneous and locally varying currents play a decisive role in the oil drift, it is possible
to exploit the drift statistics for the planning of the optimal sailing line or for safer
fairway design. In this context favourable ship routes feature a statistically lower
possibility for certain cost-intensive consequences. The environmental potential of
adaptive fairway design was addressed in terms of the reduction of risk of coastal
hits by the oil pollution (to be more precise, in terms of the drift of oil spills into
near-coastal regions). The key idea was to minimize the cost of the consequences,
i.e., the impact of accidents that may occur at sea.
The developed technology for fairway design makes use of well-defined local
minima or maxima of certain risk factors (such as the probability of hitting vulnerable areas or the time it takes for the pollution to hit such areas) related to the
J. Murawski and J. Woge Nielsen
11.1 Introduction
The ever-increasing density of maritime traffic and especially tanker traffic contributes strongly to the possibility of shipping accidents with the consequence of
near-coastal oil spills. As described in previous chapters, model-based investigations
of various risk factors have been used successfully to minimize the consequences of
shipping disasters and to increase the efficiency of fairway designs. Economical
and environmental factors are thereby fundamentally non-conflicting. In the process
of making shipping routes safer and environmentally friendlier by adaptive design,
they often become more beneficial in terms of faster travels (e.g., going with the
currents instead of against them, Lo and McCord 1995; McCord et al. 1999) and
lower fuel consumption (Lo and McCord 1998; Christiansen et al. 2004). Environmental and economical considerations are, however, rarely entering the planning
stage of fairway designs (Stokstad 2009) although model-developed design criteria can obviously contribute to optimized sea traffic, e.g., by effective route planning, emission reduction, improved disaster management or increased performance
of transport vessels.
Disaster management in the marine environment is largely understood as a response action to accidents. In particular, the partial goal to manage maritime pollution still is to develop remedial action plans (e.g., Keramitsoglou et al. 2003).
There is, however, an increasing tendency towards planning and developing various
preventive measures (Delpeche-Ellmann and Soomere 2013). These efforts aim at
bridging the gap between the economical and environmental factors by means of including potential environmental losses into the risk equation (see Chap. 1). The final
goal is to build a combined platform of coupled forecasting models for the atmosphere, waves and ocean circulation, which feed the relevant information concerning
the drift and fate of pollutants at sea into the disaster impact model, and develop a
suitable quantification of the relevant risks and costs for ship routing services and
fairway performance analysis.
The efforts in this direction described in the previous chapters were targeted at
the evaluation of fairway and sailing line design under safety, risk, disaster impact
and ship performance viewpoints combined with certain environmental criteria. The
analysis was based on the idea of highlighting the potential of semi-persistent (but
still statistically significant) current patterns and current-driven oil drift characteristics in the risk for coastal areas. In regions where the oil propagation is heterogeneous and locally varying currents play a decisive role in the oil drift, it is possible
to exploit the drift statistics for the planning of the optimal sailing line or for safer
fairway design. In this context favourable ship routes feature a statistically lower
possibility for certain cost-intensive consequences. The environmental potential of
adaptive fairway design was addressed in terms of the reduction of risk of coastal
hits by the oil pollution (to be more precise, in terms of the drift of oil spills into
near-coastal regions). The key idea was to minimize the cost of the consequences,
i.e., the impact of accidents that may occur at sea.
The developed technology for fairway design makes use of well-defined local
minima or maxima of certain risk factors (such as the probability of hitting vulnerable areas or the time it takes for the pollution to hit such areas) related to the