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THE MARITIME BACKBONE OF SOCIETY IS A MATTER OF URGENCY BY MATHIAS BALLING
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hings are heating up on our seas – no pun intended. The amount of marine traffic grows every year and parallel to this, subsea and offshore infrastructures are being expanded all over the world. Consequently, ensuring safety in both national and international waters is becoming increasingly important and moving up on the agendas of both international maritime conferences and renowned news agencies across the world. More marine traffic comes with a higher risk of more illegal traffic, such as dark ships conducting illegal activities. More traffic also means increased risk of damaging subsea and offshore infrastructure, such as power and telecom cables, gas and oil pipelines, offshore windfarms as well as offshore oilrigs.
A WAKE-UP CALL IN THE BALTIC SEA
Recent incidents in several countries underline the importance of ensuring maritime safety, while adding urgency to finding innovative technologies that can drive a safer maritime world – both regarding dark ship detection and
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asset protection, which several international consortiums are now trying to tackle by calling for new technology developments. Subsea and offshore assets are an important backbone of society. Subsea cables across the globe are the backbone of the internet as they carry a staggering 95 % of the world’s data traffic. The importance of this can hardly be overestimated. Cable manufacturers have been developing closer ties with governments, whilst global tech giants intend to build the world’s largest private undersea internet network. At the same time, the offshore wind sector has been growing significantly in the past couple of years. These developments all pull in the same direction: Human activity on and in our oceans is growing by the day. And as the recent attack on the Nord Stream gas pipes in the Baltic Sea so clearly revealed, our subsea and offshore assets are very vulnerable to sabotage and hybrid warfare. Protecting the maritime backbones of society has truly become a matter of urgency.