SMACS Project
Climate change is making ever larger areas of the Arctic maritime region accessible for small craft in the fishing, tourism and leisure sectors. However, the Arctic still remains a hazardous region for inadequately prepared mariners.
Climate change is altering weather and ice patterns and creating new dangers which is posing new challenges to all mariners in the region. Growing large vessel activity in the tourism, cargo, mining and oil exploration sectors presents additional hazards to the safe navigation of small craft.
There is therefore an urgent need for safety and emergency response training for Arctic mariners. However, while such training is regulated and widely available for large vessel crew, this is not the situation for small craft mariners who find it more difficult to access Arctic-specific training. The EU-funded SMACS Project aims to fill this gap, and to make the Arctic a safer location for small craft maritime activity, by developing a safety and emergency response training programme specifically focused on the needs of small craft mariners.
SMACS – Small Craft Emergency Response and Survival Training for Arctic Conditions – is a collaborative international project under the Northern Periphery Programme (www.northernperiphery.eu) of the EU and is supported by the European Regional Development Fund. It is a two-year project (started October 2012).
Its primary objective is the development of a safety and survival training programme for small-craft Arctic mariners. The SMACS Training Programme will be made available free of charge to all training providers after the end of the project. Three of the five SMACS partners are engaged in maritime training provision (Cork Institute of Technology in Ireland, Chalmers University in Sweden and MSSTC in Iceland) and two in Arctic Search and Rescue (SSRS and NSSR, the maritime search and rescue organizations of Sweden and Norway respectively). SMACS also has Associated Partners in Greenland, Norway, Faroes and Ireland.
Further information is available on the SMACS website www.smacs-project.eu.
The SMACS partners are particularly interested in hearing the views of the small craft community internationally and invite you to complete the SMACS online survey at http://www.smacs-project.eu/?q=survey
