Application and analysis of the IMO taxonomy on casualty investigation over 20 years of marine events in the Russian and Norwegian Arctic

Laurent Fedi (1) , Olivier Faury (2) , Ali Cheaitou (3) , Laurent Etienne (4) , Patrick Rigot-Muller (5)

1 Kedge BS - Kedge Business School
2 Métis Lab EM Normandie
3 UoS - University of Sharjah
4 LABISEN-KLAIM - Knowledge Learning and Information Modelling
5 Maynooth University - National University of Ireland Maynooth

The Arctic Ocean is simultaneously rich in terms of hydrocarbons and rare earth and highly sensitive to human activity. Due to the remoteness of the multiple production areas, the development and use of rail roads would be too costly and hard to pay-back, hence the use of maritime transport appears as the main profitable solution. Yet hydrocarbons fields, mines and human activities are not equally spread around the Arctic. As an evidence, the Russian Federation and Norwegian coast are highly developed with ports such as Sabetta for LNG or Novy for crude oil and also Murmansk as a regional hub for Russia and Kirkenes for Norway. Concomitantly, former years witnessed an exponential increase in the amount of cargo shipped along the Russian shores in line with the requirement of the President of the Russian Federation and his target of 80 million tons shipped by 2024. These parameters, combined with the ice melting, may increase the density of traffic in the coming years and consequently the number of accidents and the corresponding number of claims. Until now, few maritime claims within the Russian Arctic have been analyzed and reported in the literature. However, when one investigates different sources of information, it appears that around 140 claims occurred with different layers of severity between 1991 and 2011. Based on a 20-year observation period and following the standardized IMO taxonomy on casualty investigation, we classified these claims by level of severity, frequency of occurrence, geographical area and time period. Our results stress the fact that most existing studies underestimate the severity of the claims occurring in the Russian Arctic. Finally, we call for a greater reporting of maritime events and compliance with the IMO risk classification tool to better understand accidentology in this risky zone.

Mots clés: Arctic navigation; maritime claims; POLARIS; Russia; IMO Casualty Investigation Code; Arctic navigation

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation

Laurent Fedi, Olivier Faury, Ali Cheaitou, Laurent Etienne, Patrick Rigot-Muller. Application and analysis of the IMO taxonomy on casualty investigation over 20 years of marine events in the Russian and Norwegian Arctic. 28th Annual Conference of the International Association of Maritime Economists, Jun 2020, Hong Kong, China. ⟨hal-03355149⟩