Maritime waterway risk control options’ effectiveness: An empirical analysis of PAWSA reports

Waterway safety is a significant societal concern, with especially maritime shipping accidents possibly leading to serious consequences. Many risk analysis approaches have been proposed to support waterway risk management. Recommended by key international organizations, the Ports And Waterways Safety Assessment (PAWSA) method is one of the approaches most widely used in practice to identify and analyze hazards and to identify and assess risk control options (RCOs). However, there is little to no systematic knowledge in the literature about what RCOs have been proposed for waterway risk mitigation, and especially concerning how effective these are in reducing risks. Therefore , this research focuses on what RCOs have been proposed in PAWSA analyses facilitated by the United States Coast Guard based on 21 PAWSA reports from 2016 to 2023, how effective these have been rated to be, and - recognizing the importance of considering uncertainty in risk assessment- what the strength-of-evidence (SoE) is for the RCOs’ risk reduction. To obtain empirical results, content analysis is applied along with a tailor-made SoE assessment scheme. The resulting data is analysed using summary statistics, indicating which RCOs are most frequently proposed for what PAWSA risk factors, and how effective these were rated to be. The results show that the effectiveness of many RCOs is not strongly justified. The findings suggest that there is a need for increased focus on developing and applying approaches to ascertain the risk-reducing effect of RCOs.