Assessing the risk of potential oil spills in the Arctic due to shipping

Abstract The impact of climate change on the Arctic region has created opportunities for both shipping and natural resource exploration. These opportunities present risk in the form of oil spills. This chapter presents a review of risk assessment techniques which are both static and dynamic in nature. It further explores the challenges to implementing these techniques in Arctic scenarios, especially for shipping. A potential scenario is used to illustrate how these tools are used. The tier IV fugacity approach is employed in combination with the Monte Carlo simulation technique to model the fate and transport of oil spill. This tracks where the oil goes after the spill. To address data limitation, variability, and uncertainty issue further, the Bayesian approach, through influence diagrams and the Object-oriented Bayesian Network (OOBN), is used to address this concern. The results of the simulation of the scenario show that the tools available are capable of addressing the problems of oil spill risk assessment. However, there is need to fill knowledge gap with respect to some of the algorithms for some processes and data.