Oil spill off the southern coast of Sweden would cost 100-200 million euro

A shipping accident outside the coasts of the Swedish counties Skåne and Blekinge, with subsequent oil spill, would cost society about one to two billion Swedish crowns, shows a new report produced by IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute on behalf of Region Skåne, Blekinge Region, and the EU project Baltic Master II. At the same time, the preparedness of the coastal communities to deal with oil spills is alarmingly low.

The report deals with scenarios for three different ship accidents outside Skåne, Blekinge, and the coast of Poland, if 5,000 tons of oil were to leak out and run towards land. An oil spill of that size outside the Skåne coast is estimated to cost at least 200 million Euro (SEK1.8 billion), outside the Blekinge coast 100 million Euro (SEK900 million), and off the coast of Poland around 400 million Euro (SEK 3.6 billion).

Of the sums that such an oil spill is estimated to cost society, the clean-up constitutes a relatively small part. The business community would take the biggest impact in terms of loss of income from areas such as tourism and fishing industries. In the examples, the report estimated that the value of tourism in the affected areas would fall by almost 20-50 percent.

The report also includes an analysis of other expenses which often can be difficult to value economically.
- The study is one of the first of its kind to include non-market costs. We are talking about ecosystem services, which means services that nature gives us - in this case that an oil spill may reduce the opportunities for recreation. Limited recreation amounts in our study to, at most, 83 percent of the total cost of an oil spill, says Annika Tegeback, oil spill expert at IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute.

A previous study by the EU project Baltic Master II, which was presented in December 2011, shows that more than half of the Swedish coastal municipalities in whole or in part lack a contingency plan to handle an oil spill off its coastline. Many more of these municipalities have never even performed preventive exercises.

The Baltic Sea is one of the world's busiest waters, and ship traffic is increasing rapidly both for existing oil transportation and regular freighters. At the same time, the Baltic Sea has a unique maritime ecosystem which is very sensitive to pollution. Municipalities in Sweden have the ultimate responsibility on land to work with prevention of possible oil spills at sea and to do the cleaning up when an accident has occurred.

Here is a summary of the report. PDF (pdf, 380 kB)

The full report can be downloaded here. PDF (pdf, 2 MB)