North Adriatic Maritime Incident Response System – NAMIRS Project

The area of the Northern Adriatic is an enclosed basin north of an imaginary line connecting Ancona and Zadar with a high vessel traffic density. The area of about 550 km2 is shared by the three partner countries Croatia, Italy, and Slovenia. For these countries, the Northern Adriatic is very important in terms of the interactions among different uses of the sea (coastal and maritime tourism, freight and passenger transport, fisheries, aquaculture, oil and gas, energy and communications, sand mining, cultural heritage, protected areas). In this context, accidental marine pollution, especially oil spills, is a dangerous threat with potentially devastating environmental and economic consequences. This cooperation process will lead to smoother communication and interoperability by creating an operational sub-regional mechanism that is immediately available to the countries of the Northern Adriatic and the EU and can be easily transferred to the other countries of the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. The result is the NAMIRS (North Adriatic Maritime Incident Response System) project, which is co-funded under the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. Through a holistic approach to marine pollution management at sea and onshore, NAMIRS will help to improve prevention and protection from the effects of maritime disasters in the North Adriatic Sea by establishing a common oil spill contingency plan. The objectives of the project are, therefore: risk assessment for the Northern Adriatic and a new approach to identifying the sensitivity and vulnerability of coastal areas using the subject opinions of stakeholders from an environmental, geomorphological and socioeconomic point of view, mapping of existing oil spill prevention resources, improvement of existing resources, drafting guidelines for the revision and updating of the sub-regional contingency plan, development of standard operating procedures and finally testing of the SOPs through exercises. An inventory of existing oil spill prevention and coastal clean-up assets and equipment was made, with the aim of integrating these resources and the different layers of coastal vulnerability into a standard electronic chart in the form of a GIS or an app which would be used by first responders to protect critical areas from an oil spill.