According to a recent research, ship strikes are one of the main human-induced threats to whale survival. A variety of measures have been used or proposed to reduce collisions, and this paper proposes an approach to evaluate mitigation measures based on a risk assessment framework that has been adopted by the IMO, namely the Formal Safety Assessment (FSA).
Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) is “a rational and systematic process for assessing the risk related to maritime safety and the protection of the marine environment and for evaluating the costs and benefits of IMO’s options for reducing these risks”.
The paper illustrates the use of a systematic risk assessment methodology, namely the FSA, to evaluate measures to reduce the risk of collisions between ships and whales.
Step 1: Hazard identification
The hazard identification step aims to identify all potential hazardous scenarios, which could lead to significant consequences and prioritize them by risk level. In the case study, the collision event is considered as the main event.
[smlsubform prepend=”GET THE SAFETY4SEA IN YOUR INBOX!” showname=false emailtxt=”” emailholder=”Enter your email address” showsubmit=true submittxt=”Submit” jsthanks=false thankyou=”Thank you for subscribing to our mailing list”]
This step aims to identify hazards that contribute the most to the collision. The completion of this step will most probably require the creation of an expert focus group but reviewing the literature and consultations with the industry lead to a first hazard identification. The collision hazards were divided into two main categories:
- Detection failure;
- Avoidance failure.
and six sub-categories:
Step 2: Risk analysis
The risk analysis step aims to obtain a quantitative measure of the probability of occurrence of risk contributors and an evaluation of the potential consequences associated with the identified hazards in the previous step. Usually, the applications of FSA focus on events such as ship-ship collisions, groundings, fires/explosion for which there are available casualty databases.
Step 3: Risk control options
According to the FSA Guidelines, the purpose of Step 3 is to propose effective and practical Risk Control Options (RCOs) comprising the following four principal stages:
- Focusing on risk areas needing control;
- Identifying potential risk control measures (RCMs);
- Evaluating the effectiveness of the RCMs in reducing risk by re-evaluating step 2;
- Grouping RCMs into practical regulatory options.
Step 4: Assessing the costs and benefits
The purpose of Step 4 is to identify and compare the benefits and costs associated with the implementation of each RCO identified and defined in Step 3. A cost-benefit assessment may consist of the following stages:
- Consider the risks assessed in Step 2, both in terms of frequency and consequence, in order to define the base case in terms of risk levels of the situation under consideration;
- Arrange the RCOs, defined in Step 3, in a way to facilitate understanding of the costs and benefits resulting from the adoption of an RCO;
- Estimate the pertinent costs and benefits for all RCOs;
- Estimate and compare the cost-effectiveness of each option, in terms of the cost per unit of risk reduction by dividing the net cost by the risk reduction achieved as a result of implementing the option;
- Rank the RCOs from a cost-benefit perspective in order to facilitate the decision-making recommendations in Step 5.
Step 5: Recommendation for decision-making
The purpose of this Step is to define recommendations, which should be presented to the decision-makers in an auditable and traceable manner. RCOs that should be proposed for implementation will be recommended by the decision-maker, in the case of FSA, this should be the IMO after receiving recommendations from a group of independent experts.
The recommendations would be based upon the comparison and ranking of all hazards; the comparison and ranking of risk control options as a function of associated costs and benefits; and the identification of those risk control options which keep risks as low as reasonably practicable.
You may see more information in the following report