Inmarsat Maritime and Maritime London have joined forces to establish SEA-CARE, a new working group of stakeholders from industry, regulators, and the UK government designed to share maritime safety data and explore ways to drive improvement.
Jos Standerwick, Chief Executive, Maritime London is chairing the group alongside Inmarsat Maritime’s Vice President of Safety & Regulatory, Peter Broadhurst.
The initiative has grown out Inmarsat’s experiences in creating its annual The Future of Maritime Safety report, which analyses Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS) call records and is now in its sixth year of accumulating data.
SEA-CARE stakeholders will have access to this record of real incidents involving perceived danger, which can be combined with other relevant data to potentially create new insights into safety best practices.
“While distress call data provides valuable information, the reasons the calls are made are not always clear from the data,” said Mr Broadhurst.
“The volume of calls year on year is persistently high, and a high proportion also turn out to have been unnecessary. If we enriched GMDSS data with this information, for example, our industry could implement preventive measures to reduce the call volume.”
A first meeting of the group brought together participants from the London & International Insurance Brokers’ Association, the International Maritime Rescue Federation, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and the International Transport Workers’ Federation.
The attendees evaluated how other datasets could be integrated to provide a more holistic view of maritime safety, including information from flag states, the IMO, insurance brokers, and shipping companies.
In acknowledging that organisations may have concerns over sharing sensitive data, the group has agreed that anonymised information could be used retrospectively to achieve the goals of the initiative.
At the next meeting SEA-CARE committee members intend to nominate a top five list of safety issues facing the industry and decide which organisations to approach about sharing data with the goal of gaining insight into safety risks.
