Assessing the Consequences from Marine Accidents: Introduction to a Risk Acceptance Criterion for Greece

The aim of this article is to shed some light on an appropriate criterion for assessing risk/consequences in the maritime transport industry, with respect to the view of society. A major problem is how to derive credible and exploitable data from/for the society and try to understand how it reacts to accidents (i.e., misfortunes) of different scale. Therefore the set problem is the assessment of the maximum risk that the society will tolerate for a specific activity. In the shipping industry, the problem is complicated due to the fact that a single maritime incident can produce consequences of different types, for example, both human losses and oil spillage can result from the same accident. In effect, this article focuses on the integration of different consequences of an accident into one metric that will allow the direct and exploitable comparison of accidents of different scales and characteristics and therefore present a clearer picture of the risks that the society takes and/or is willing to accept. Hence, a new framework for marine risk assessment is introduced, which is able to project the risk that a group of people (i.e., the society) can accept for accidents of different size or type.