MANY NAUTICAL MILES TO SAIL Sustained Collaboration Critical to Secure Seas

While there are binding treaties and conventions safeguarding maritime traffic, there is a need to run a tight ship, facilitating multi-later cooperation, satellite detection, reconnaissance, and intel-sharing.

By Guy Thomas

In March this year, there was a great deal of celebration at the United Nations and elsewhere on the signing of the High Seas Treaty, and rightfully so. However, the work required to make our seas safer in all respects is not done by a long shot.

While the High Seas Treaty does provide strictures for the governance of the Blue Ocean world, it does not stipulate the building of the system of Global Maritime Awareness needed to detect, track, apprehend, and thus deter, treaty violators and other wrongdoers.

Maritime security has multiple dimensions, including but not limited to maritime law enforcement, safety, environment protection, science & technology, maritime trade & economy, maritime law, trade sanctions enforcement, and public health.

However, there can be no Maritime Security without Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) and Global MSA can only be achieved by a global approach involving all the above stakeholders plus industry and academia on a truly global scale.

In the last dozen years, unclassified space systems, led by satellite AIS, which provides the identification and locational information crucial in any geospatial system, have shown that they can dramatically improve maritime awareness and are now in use in several regions.

Collaboration in Space for International Global Maritime Awareness (C-SIGMA) is a concept which capitalizes on these new systems to improve life on Earth worldwide by increasing maritime safety and security via specific unclassified space systems’ capabilities. Of course, terrestrial systems would also be melded into the data flow of the global maritime awareness system. No one system, terrestrial or space-based, can do it all by itself.

These new capabilities in space could – and should be – employed globally. The High Seas Treaty addresses the global problem of lawlessness at sea, including illegal fishing and other marine resource theft, smuggling of narcotics, weapons, people and other contraband, marine environmental damage, and even slavery.

All of these crimes could be mitigated via coordinated use of satellite systems, which helps improve safety of life at sea and assist in disaster mitigation and recovery.

C-SIGMA is the pathway to global maritime cooperation for safety, environmental protection, resource conservation, and security.

While the United Nations is the logical choice to lead the way for the benefit of all, but if it fails to act, then others need to step up to this task. In the long run, the benefits would outweigh the costs.

Since the era of sea pirates and buccaneers, smuggling is the oldest crime committed at sea, but its ambit has broadened over the years, now including sanction evasions as well. Many of these crimes also infringe on nation- state security, with weapons and drugs being the most common, and the most damaging to national security. Then there are safety regulation violations, both for the safety of the ship and the crew.

This second set spills over into human rights violations. The final two basic divisions of hurtful actions at sea are closely related but distinctly different. They are related because they both deal with the marine environment and its protection.

Polluters defile the oceans while thieves steal fish, minerals, oil, and now, even sand, harming the marine environment as well as the states which are the victims of these crimes.

Right now, there are some crime-specific systems, but one collaborative collection system could be tasked to gather data and that information could be analysed to determine illicit activities.

Significance of Maritime Security

Immediately after 9/11, there was a need to improve the security of the maritime assets of the USA from terrorists. Around the same time, there was a lot of information and awareness on the effects of crime at sea and its disastrous impact on marine environment.

The various problems that were considered made it clear that one master system, most probably administered by region, was required. But there needs to be one hub coordinating the global collaboration required to combat these crimes, especially marine pollution and theft. All of these are global problems that require a coordinated global response.

In the 21st century, it is well known that the cyber world has expanded exponentially though parts of it still skulk in the shadows. Since 2004, there has also been an ongoing revolution in space-based Earth observation systems led by space-based AIS. These capabilities not only support safety and security at sea but can also significantly assist in economic and environmental stewardship, resource protection, as well as disaster mitigation and recovery.

This is especially true of the remote territories such as the Arctic, and resource-rich areas in the underdeveloped world such as the Gulf of Guinea, the South China Sea, Micronesia, the Indian Ocean, as well as the South Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America.

One of the good things is that many new, highly capable space systems are either here now or will be here in the next few years. Advances in the cyber world including Big Data mining, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning are allowing more complete processing of the data provided by these new systems. The expansions in both Earth observation from space and in-data handling provide us with a unique, epoch-making opportunity

Core requirements of geospatial information include the location of the object in question and some way of identifying it. Satellite AIS does precisely that. It was the missing link, but now it has been well-deployed.

Until satellite AIS came online ships were often only identified by their physical characteristics and their location when imaged by satellites. With the launch of the first satellite AIS constellation in 2008 by ORBCOMM the marine world now had a system that provided the core geospatial requirements of location and identification of all the legal ships in the world.

The potential contributions of space-based Earth observation systems to maritime awareness is of growing interest to the world’s naval and law enforcement forces, as well as to environmental preservationists, commerce, maritime, environmental protection, and disaster preparedness governmental ministries.

Apart from them, it is valuable for ship brokers and those interested in marine domain environment and security. However, coordination to maximize these capabilities is lacking.

Need of the Hour

Ongoing research shows that no single country or organization has the ability and resources to fully support the safe, secure, and efficient use of the maritime domain. This is due to the fact that conservation and protection of marine environment with finite resources of fish, minerals, and oil cannot be done unilaterally.

Among the greatest need, as well as the greatest opportunities, for international collaboration are presented by the multiple national and regional efforts to develop the doctrine and concept of operations to coordinate the use of the space technologies now available for detecting, identifying, and tracking vessels well offshore, on a global scale. These systems are especially suited in areas with shared international interests such as the Arctic, in pirate-infested waters, or in areas known to support smuggling or resource theft of all types.

Implementing C-SIGMA could well be the key to building the envisioned, truly global, maritime security system, and would substantially assist in many tasks including the detection of illegal smuggling of all types, improved maritime pollution control, resource protection, as well as dramatically assisting humanitarian assistance and disaster recovery operations.

Remote ocean surveillance in such areas as the Arctic, the southern oceans, and the western Pacific would immediately benefit people everywhere. C-SIGMA already exists in Europe via FRONTEX and the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA). Implementing it in the Arctic and a few other locales such as the Gulf of Guinea and the western Pacific could be the needed stepping stone to the implementation of truly Global Maritime Awareness for the betterment of the entire world.

The positive side is that hardly a week goes without news of more capable satellites being launched. And a lot of countries have commenced using these systems for maritime situational awareness.

Several regional organizations have been created to provide coordinated maritime situational awareness to their national military and law enforcement leaders. There is some coordination between various regional centers, but there is no global collaboration to provide global maritime awareness, which is vital to protect the global marine environment.

C-SIGMA envisions seizing that opportunity by linking together existing and planned unclassi- fied space system capabilities in a worldwide collaborative network via coordinated regional centers for international global maritime awareness to provide substantially improved security, safety, environmental protection, resource conservation, as well as disaster mitigation and recovery.

The time to take advantage of new opportunities unveiled due to the tidal wave of New Space systems and enhanced Earth Observation capabilities, drawing across the horizon, and rapidly bearing down on the world is now.