Brussels, 08/07/2014 (Agence Europe) - In a communication adopted on Tuesday 8 July, the European Commission argues in favour of speeding up the process towards achieving a more effective and cost-efficient surveillance of the European seas.
By bringing together surveillance data from civil and military authorities, such as coastguards, navies, traffic monitoring, environmental pollution monitoring, fisheries and border control, duplication of work can be avoided and savings of up to €400 million a year can be made.
CISE, the Common Information Sharing Environment for the maritime domain, aims to make sure that all involved maritime surveillance actors have a complete picture of all events at sea. “Today, about 40% of information is collected several times and 40% to 80% of information is not shared among the interested users. We cannot afford such a waste of efforts and money”, said Maria Damanaki, Commissioner for Maritime Affairs. The communication presents the progress made since the CISE roadmap was drawn up in 2010. The Commission intends to launch a project under the EU's seventh Framework Programme for Research in order to test maritime CISE on a large scale. It will also produce a handbook, working together with the member states, on best practice recommendations on how to apply CISE based on experience from existing systems and pilot projects such as MARSUNO, BluemassMed and Cooperation. The Commission will also continue to support measures to develop standards to allow interoperability between systems. (LC)