#FutureSAR: Tides of Change - Executive Summary

This is the executive summary of the final report of the first phase of International Maritime Rescue Federation’s (IMRF) #FutureSAR initiative. The aim of the initiative as a whole is to identify the key challenges the global maritime search and rescue (SAR) industry will face as a result of climate change and propose guidance and best practices that will aid rescue operations in the future. The report separately looks at adaptations required by SAR services to climate change, and mitigation measures that these services could do to alleviate climatic change. However, the emphasis of this stage of the project and the report is on adaptation. While the report focuses primarily on maritime SAR in oceans and seas, it also covers SAR operations conducted in inland lakes. The report is divided into impacts on different sectors of the SAR organisation, including administration, vessel design and building, equipment, operational personnel and training, operations, stations, and units. The division is designed to assist the reader in looking into impacts relevant for them: for instance, a person responsible for training might be primarily interested in impacts on operational personnel and training, and only secondarily on, for instance, vessel design. Therefore, there is no need to read the entire report, just the sections the reader finds relevant for them. The report comprises of 85 identified impacts climate change may have on SAR services globally. Each of the impacts is presented in the report, and further broken down into more detailed impact mechanisms. Some of them are likely to influence all SAR organisations, whereas others will only be applicable to some. Therefore, organisations are encouraged to go through the impacts and the associated checklist items to assess which impacts are relevant for them either now or in the future. These checklist items can be used to improve the organisation’s readiness for climate change.