East Med Cross-border Marine Environmental Risk Assessment through E-Platform Integrated Data Management

Coastal cities are ever expanding hubs for transport and trade and global shipping is increasing the connectivity of coastal cities. The marine and coastal infrastructure are a source of pollution of the marine environment, due to contamination caused by oil discharges, synthetic compounds, the introduction of non-native species through ballast water, use of agriculture fertilizers, fouling, light and noise. Further, recent marine pollution events (e.g., Israeli coast polluted by Tar from an unknown marine source in February 2021, the coastal accident in Banias in Lebanon caused by a continuous spillage from a refinery plant) have spread their effects beyond the countries boundaries, indicating that marine pollution hazards and incidents can have cross-border effects. However, the cross-border collaboration on performing risk assessments to jointly identify marine pollution risks with potential cross-border environmental effects and developing tools to share data and information in order to effectively communicate these risks at crossborder levels, remains fragmented. To address such gaps, this EMMERA project brings together partners from the area of Eastern Mediterranean to share knowledge and expertise and develop both a methodology that can support and develop cross-border risk assessments and an E-platform to cooperatively share information, process and analyse data on marine environmental incidents, and provide warnings for detecting marine pollution events. This presents a novel proposal for the Eastern Mediterranean region to establish joint action plans for identifying, assessing, and communicating marine pollution hazards. Make this at least 120 characters