Status of maritime safety

About the situational picture of maritime safety

This situational picture consists of the national database of maritime accidents and incidents maintained by the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom. The situational picture is needed for monitoring the effectiveness of safety management systems, identifying maritime risks and safety trends to facilitate regulatory operations and developing regulation. Access to and the utilisation of reliable and high-quality data make it possible to adopt an increasingly risk-based operating model in regulatory work, allowing the resources of authorities to be allocated on the basis of a risk picture to where safety and environmental risks and the potential to influence them are greatest.

From the perspective of improving safety, the effectiveness of data is becoming increasingly relevant to improving the safety of the transport system. The constantly increasing automation of the entire transport system also provides new tools for safety work. A new challenge in the future will be the cyber security of maritime operations.

Maritime safety is also being improved through increasingly close cooperation between different authorities. Combining the maritime safety data and analyses of different authorities results in more comprehensive and reliable risk assessment. In addition to this, constant interaction with the private sector and other stakeholders, such as educational institutions and researchers, is also considered crucial to advancing maritime safety.

Threats or operating models and phenomena that cause threats need to be identified as early as possible so that operations can be adapted to prevent accidents. Threats are identified with the help of safety indicators, which are divided into three main categories:

• The state of maritime safety, which describes the general state of maritime safety at the annual level.
• Safety in Finland’s sea areas, which lists the details of accidents, occurrences and violations in Finland’s sea areas, and
• The safety of Finnish vessels, which provides more detailed information about accidents and incidents involving Finnish vessels by type of accident and vessel class, for example.

Situational picture of maritime safety

In 2023, the number of accidents remained consistent on average with previous years. Overall, the state of maritime safety in Finland can be considered stable and good.

In 2023, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom received a total of 41 reports of merchant shipping accidents. In 2022, the number of accident reports received was 30. The number includes accidents involving Finnish vessels that occurred in Finnish waters and abroad and accidents involving foreign vessels that occurred in Finnish waters. During the last ten years, the number of marine accidents has varied from 29 to 50 per year. Although merchant shipping accidents do occur, their consequences have been minor. During the last ten years, merchant shipping accidents have not caused any significant negative impacts on the environment, nor have they resulted in any fatalities or major injuries. 

During 2023, Traficom was informed of 34 accidents in Finnish waters. In 2022, the number of accidents was 25. Of these accidents, 25 involved Finnish vessels (22 in 2022). The number of port calls (28 084) decreased slightly compared to the previous year.

Based on the information received, Finnish vessels were involved in seven (7) accidents abroad. During the last five years, this number has varied between three and seven a year.

While annual variation in the number of marine accidents has been high at times, it should be noted that the number of accidents alone does not provide information about the development of maritime safety, as the variation is random.

The Finnish Maritime Act has long obliged operators to report all accidents to the relevant national authority, but a similar obligation concerning incidents has only been in effect since 2017.

The Finnish Maritime Act was amended in 2017 with an obligation requiring the master or operator of a ship to promptly report any accidents and incidents that occur in connection with the operations of the ship. In this context, an incident at sea means an event or chain of events that does not correspond to the definition of an accident and that occurred in direct connection with the operation of a ship and either endangered or, without intervention, would have endangered the safety of the ship, the persons on board or the environment. Since the reporting of incidents has been mandatory for only a very short time so far, the benefits of the reporting will be better realised in the near future, as more statistics and user experiences are accumulated.

During 2017–2022, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom received a total of 134 incident reports. The number includes incidents involving Finnish vessels in Finnish waters and abroad and incidents involving foreign vessels in Finnish waters.