Maritime Safety in the North Adriatic Sea and the Gulf of Finland

This chapter deals with the issue of early warning in maritime safety. The goal of this chapter is to compare what sort of safety culture and what level of transborder cooperation have been developed in two similar maritime areas of Europe: the North Adriatic and the Gulf of Finland.The first section outlines and discusses different scientific approaches to the sea and safety culture with reference to maritime spaces, as analysed in the relevant literature. The second section summarises the situation of maritime safety in the North Adriatic, by presenting its basic physical features, traffic volumes and routes, types of risks, and characteristics of social actors involved. In the third section the same kind of data is offered with reference to the case study of the Gulf of Finland. The fourth section concludes this chapter by focussing on the comparison between the two case studies areas. Similarities and differences are underlined, with a particular care given to the issue of transborder cooperation, among the three neighbouring countries in both sea areas, in the field of civil and environmental protection.With this chapter, the authors approach the issues of security, safety and related problems in terms of functions usually performed by public institutions and traditionally part of the public policy. However, they state, the change of welfare and its growing costs, combined with the higher and more sensitive status of security/safety issues bring the civil protection and disaster reduction right to the centre of the political debate. Moreover, the new faces of international terrorism, the changing environmental conditions and the increased criminal activities connected with mobility patterns (illegal migrations, slavery and prostitution, smuggling, trafficking in human being, illegal weapons trade) progressively erase the border line between civil and military spheres of security and set the stage for a larger and all encompassing notion of safety.According to the authors, today there is no unambiguous definition of either the concept or the substance of safety or safety culture. In EU documents and practices the notion of civil safety is used in more restricted or larger fashions, without much consistency: sometimes it is understood as part of larger concepts as civil security and in other occasions is referred to in more traditional ways as the number of rescue activities in exceptional situations like emergencies, crisis, catastrophes and natural/man made disasters. [...]