Gulf of Guinea maritime criminality analysis with Geographic Information Systems

• Autor(a) principal: Pacheco, Luís Miguel Cardoso Pércio Bessa
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/18648
• topic: Gulf of Guinea;maritime piracy;maritime assaults;shipping;oil

Over the past few years, the Gulf of Guinea has been increasing its world share of oil production. At the same time, armed robbery and piracy attacks have become a permanent threat to the maritime agents in the region. Oil theft, crew kidnapping for ransom and robbery of crew and ship valuables are the most common outcomes of successful attacks. To better understand the phenomena, a political, economic, social and environmental analysis of the region was perf or med, and a geographic information system was developed to provide a deeper analysis and understanding of the correlation between geographical and scope factors of this criminal activity, considering the period from January 2012 to May 2015. The system integrates the land and maritime boundaries, population, religion, oil/gas platforms, oil/gas fields, reported attacks on ships and spatial analysis results. Several factors are pointed out as major contributors to today’s maritime criminality in the Gulf of Guinea. The geographic information system analytical outputs provide a view of the geographical concentration, trends and perceive a slow decreas ing of this threat until 2014 and a slowgrowing tendency in 2015.