Unmanned Remotely Operated Search and Rescue Ships in the Canadian Arctic: Exploring the Opportunities, Risk Dimensions and Governance Implications

Abstract

This chapter is a proactive risk exploration of hypothetical remotely operated search and rescue (SAR) ships in the Canadian Arctic. The harsh and remote environment in the region, combined with complicated coastlines and many uncharted or poorly charted traffic routes, makes it one of the most challenging SAR areas. Canada has committed itself to safety, environmental protection and sovereign presence in the area by maintaining joint SAR centres of federal government departments and mobilizing private volunteers. The characteristics of Canadian SAR response in the Arctic rest with its high dependency on heavy equipment such as aircraft, helicopters and icebreakers, entailing prolonged hours of response time. As recent climate change impacts and maritime traffic increase in the northern waters disclose safety gaps, innovation in SAR assets is anticipated. The safety gaps may be filled by state-of-the-art remote control technology. This chapter discusses remotely operated unmanned ships for SAR response, exploring their opportunities, risk dimensions and governance implications.

Uncrewed autonomous marine vessels test the limits of maritime safety frameworks

“…Most research and development projects design UMVs with the capacity to change between levels of autonomy (IMO 2018), requiring flexibility in regulatory requirements to accommodate UMVs. Indeed, the literature on the regulation of UMV, especially in national waters, generally emphasises the emerging nature of the technology and highlights the challenges for the existing maritime regulatory regime when considering UMV (Qveim-Leikanger 2018; Yoo et al 2020;Dean and Clack 2019;Judson and Horne 2019). Generally, the approach is to focus on the formal rules and processes in the regime and identify the gaps and difficulties that possible UMVs might have in being accommodated within the existing regime.…”