MARIS - Maritime Accident Response Information System

Introduction

The growing concern for the risks of oil spills in the Baltic Sea was acknowledged by the Nordic Council of Ministers. In the spring 2003 it initialized a project to map out these risks and the capacity to combat them. The project was funded completely by the council and realized by the
Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE).

MARIS is the result of this work.

The estimation and analysis of the oil transportation and its risks is a complex issue - the used background information depends on the point of view and scale chosen by the individual. In our opinion one good way to gain an overview of the situation - in larger or smaller scale - is to view the different datasets in relation to each other. The easiest way to combine different datasets is to utilize data included in a geographical information system (GIS).

MARIS-system was created by combining already existing data from different sources: studies, analyses and statistics that have been or are still collected and updated annually. Most of the data is collected as part of the HELCOM work, but some data has been collected also by other organs such as UNEP Grid Geneva and Grid Arendal, ESRI (Digital Chart of the World), TACIS (COWI), European Commission, BFN and VTT Technical Research Center of Finland. Some data was collected from other sources like oil terminals' web pages.

MARIS can be used to view different datasets related to oil spill risk and response over a common background map and in different combinations. MARIS also gives possibilities for the officials and other experts in each country to assess the maritime risks and response resources in their areas, as they are the ones who can – based on their knowledge and expertise of local conditions – make the best estimations of their own areas.

The atlas consists mainly of a number of datasets describing:

- the areas most sensitive and vulnerable to oil spills

- the traffic and risk distribution

- the available resources for combating oil spills in the Baltic Sea area.

In addition, the atlas includes some necessary background datasets (coastlines, administrative boundaries etc.), documentation of all the datasets and a tool to view these map datasets. The data is projected in Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area projection based on ETRS89 datum.

MARIS has been created by compiling different existing datasets into a common format and under a single user interface. The purpose of MARIS is to help users visualize the risks of maritime transportation in the Baltic Sea and the capacity to handle these risks, concentrating mainly on the risk of oil pollution and the oil spill response equipment. The users of these datasets are mainly the competent oil pollution response authorities of the Baltic Sea states, the Nordic Council of Ministers and the HELCOM secretariat.