Towards Mitigation of Environmental Risks

This introductory chapter describes the background of a preventive technology for environmental management of remote risks associated with potentially dangerous offshore activities. The notion of environmental risk caused by shipping and offshore activities is introduced as the product of the probability of an accident and the cost of its consequences. A new paradigm of remote environmental risks of contemporary ship traffic is presented, with examples of the remote impact (such as oil spill or wake waves) and a short outline of the challenges for ship routing based on environmental criteria. Several pioneering solutions towards decreasing both the local and the remote impact of ship traffic are discussed. The concept of the quantification of offshore and remote areas in terms of their potential as starting points of pollution that after some time hits vulnerable areas is introduced, and related challenges are discussed. While the impact of wind and waves on pollution transport is relatively well understood, the largest challenge is to take into account the presence of semi-persistent patterns of currents and quantify their role in pollution propagation. An approximate solution to this inverse problem of pollution propagation can be obtained using statistical analysis of a large pool of trajectories of selected particles. There exist several meaningful ways of such a quantification of offshore domains, for example, in terms of the probability of hitting vulnerable areas or of the time it takes for the pollution to reach such areas. An engineering solution can be developed using any of these quantifications. A prototype technology for the selection of optimum fairways combines four ingredients: a high-resolution circulation model, a method for calculating Lagrangian transport, a measure of environmental risk and a method for selecting an optimum sailing line.