What problems will IMPRESSIVE address?
Dr. Ioannis Dontas – Aratos Technologies
Serious oil spill accidents with environmental consequences continue to occur nowadays with a disturbing frequency, which highlights the importance of integrated marine pollution risk assessment and emergency management support service in ports and coastal areas proposed by IMPRESSIVE.
It has been calculated that the amount of oil spilled annually worldwide has been more than 4.5 million tons. The biggest contributor to oil pollution in the World’s oceans (some 45%) is operational discharges from tankers (i.e. oil dumped during cleaning operations). Approximately 2 million tons of oil are introduced annually by such operations, equivalent to one full-tanker disaster every week. About a 9% of the oil in the sea can be directly attributed to accidents but still it is a significant percentage. Although the oil industry is fully aware of the international laws and the risks connected with marine pollution, there is still ample evidence of numerous repeat offenders. It can be easily understood that identification of the discharge source, precise photographic documentation and valid estimation on its behavior are required quickly both for the legal prosecution and the prevention of environmental damage.
In the light of the above information, we realized that there is a current need for providing end users (port authorities, public competent administrations and the maritime industry) with an integrated solution for oil spill monitoring and control in harbors and their surrounding waters. Taking into account the benefits of the different partial approaches (satellite imagery and aircraft/ship surveillance) being used so far as a starting point, new technologies, prototypes and specific software developments are proposed by IMPRESSIVE project in order to build a comprehensive and more definite user-friendly tool, which is expected to foster the exploitation of Copernicus data and information and this is where our proposal and future project stands on.
