Enhancing maritime safety

This new grant will allow two significant test sites to get underway, one in Northern Europe and one in the Mediteranean Sea involving 300 vessels, 10 ports of differing sizes and three shore centres taking part in the validation process.

The project aims to solve many of the challenges of communication and information sharing between stakeholders and industry helping to make the maritime industry safer, efficient and environmentally-friendly.

With this in mind, it has taken the first small steps have been taken towards a new global training programme for safety.

During the 95^th session of the Maritime Safety Committee (MSC), MONALISA project members laid out the fundamentals on how such a programme could be shaped in the near future, with the Jovellanos Centre, the educational arm of Salvamento Maritimo (the Spanish MSC), coordinating the effort.

Designing a training programme for maritime safety which can be adopted by the whole world is no mean feat so the task has been to take a training requirements report to other official bodies outside the IMO. These include the European Maritime Safety Administration (EMSA) and the European Commission’s DG-MOVE.

The training programme may be developed at the participating universities involved in the MONALISA 2.0 project along with the Jovellanos Centre – NTUA in Athens, Chalmers in Spain, UPM in Madrid and UPC in Barcelona.

Meanwhile, the STM project will run from 2015 to 2018 and involves 39 partners from 13 countries.

By Anne-Marie Causer