By bringing together surveillance data from civil and military authorities like coast guards, navies, traffic monitoring, environmental and pollution monitoring, fisheries and border control, duplication of work can be avoided and savings of up to €400 million per year can be made. Increased cooperation and sharing of data would help cope more efficiently with real time events at sea such as accidents, pollution incidents, crime or security threats. CISE, the Common Information Sharing Environment for the maritime domain, aims at making all the relevant actors come together and share data. CISE is one of the building blocks of the recently adopted European Maritime Security Strategy.
The Communication by the Commission presents the good progress made at EU and national level since the CISE roadmap was elaborated in 2010 and the strong commitment of all actors in this field. It also proposes guidance and priorities for further action both at national and EU levels. Main focus should be to further enhance information exchange – in particular between civil and military authorities, to better interconnect existing maritime surveillance systems and make them inter-operational. This will bring increased efficiency, quality, responsiveness and co-ordination of maritime surveillance operations in EU waters as well as any other geographical area where the EU has a vital interest. It will help create a safer investment climate for blue growth and enhance the prosperity and security of EU citizens.
Commissioner Damanaki said: “Sustainable economic growth within the maritime sector can only be ensured if our seas and oceans are safe and secure. CISE aims to make sure that all involved maritime surveillance actors have a complete picture of all events at sea. Sharing such information is key to avoid duplication in collection of data and for the use of patrol ships, planes, helicopters or satellites in the same sea areas. Today, about 40 per cent of information is collected several times and 40 to 80 per cent of information is not shared among the interested users. We cannot afford such a waste of efforts and money".
In the near future, the Commission intends to launch a project under the EU's 7th Framework Programme for Research in order to test Maritime CISE on a large scale. It will also produce a handbook, together with Member States, on best practice recommendations on how to apply CISE based on experience from existing systems and pilot projects like MARSUNO, Bluemassmed and Cooperation. The Commission will also continue to support measures to develop standards to allow inter-operability between systems.
