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Oceans and fisheries

Common information sharing environment (CISE)

Enhancing information exchange between public authorities is one of the key strategic objectives of the EU.

Objectives

The common information sharing environment (CISE) is an EU initiative providing a decentralised framework for point-to-point information exchange across sectors and borders. It is involving more than 300 EU and national authorities with responsibilities in maritime surveillance.

CISE aims to make European and national maritime surveillance systems interoperable, enabling all concerned authorities to exchange information in an automatic and secure way.

Carrying out many different operational surveillance tasks, national authorities directly benefit from being connected to CISE, in various sectors such as

  • safety and security of maritime transport
  • fisheries control
  • marine pollution preparedness and response
  • protection of marine environment
  • customs
  • border control
  • general law enforcement and
  • defence

In overall, CISE enables an effective understanding of all activities carried out at sea that could impact the security, safety, economy or environment of the EU and its member countries.

Actions

The development of CISE started in 2009 and has been refined and developed since then.

Since 2019, CISE is in a transitional phase to prepare the ground to reach its operational status. This phase is managed by the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA), involving most of the member countries and the EU agencies and benefiting from the technological and scientific support of JRC.

The Commission is steering and monitoring the whole process and encourages the participation of all member states.

The CISE Stakeholders Group is the governance body for the transitional phase, comprising expert representatives of the EU countries. Other members of the group are the Commission, the European External Action Service (EEAS), the European Defence Agency (EDA), the European Fisheries Agency (EFCA), European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA), the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), and the European Union Satellite Centre (SatCen).

Member States Experts sub-Group on Maritime Security and Surveillance (MSEsG) and the Council (Friends of the Presidency group on the EUMSS) ensure the strategic and political governance of the CISE Transitional phase.

A significant action of CISE so far was EUCISE 2020, a European security research project. EUCISE 2020 involved 40 partners from 16 EU/EEA coastal countries with the task to create a political, organisational and legal environment to enable information sharing across the seven relevant maritime sectors/user communities.

EUCISE 2020 is considered a crucial milestone in the roadmap of CISE implementation, enabling developing and testing its network, based on existing surveillance systems/networks.

Documents

CISE Communication (2014)

3 MARCH 2021
Review of the Common Information Sharing Environment (CISE) for the maritime domain: 2014 - 2019
English
(551.79 KB - PDF)
Download

Media