Overview
A vision for 2030 is “A prosperous Finland – efficient sea routes”. Its objective is to ensure that:
- Finnish foreign trade and domestic waterborne transport are smoothly functioning and socio-economically viable and international competitiveness is ensured also in winter. In order to ensure Finland's national competitiveness fairway dues should not burden maritime transport any more than at present.
- Finland will be a forerunner in winter and environmental technology and will export high competence in those fields. The operations of Finnish ship owners are vital and competitive.
- The maritime transport and maritime cluster have the skills and know-how to meet their future needs, and the visibility and attractiveness of the sector will increase.
- The Baltic Sea is safe and healthy and it attracts recreational activities and tourism to the area and provides high-quality maritime services for the use of the market area.
- Finnish maritime transport sector will become the leading service provider of the Baltic Sea countries in terms of sustainable logistic concepts. The maritime transport vision, strategic priorities, critical success factors and measures for
- 2014–2022 that are all included in the strategy have been defined together with the maritime sector and operators in this field.
Finland's maritime strategy for 2014–2022 provides an overall view that serves Finland's economy, business life and employment and takes account of the new environmental norms.
The strategy analyses the changes that have taken place in the past years and the future challenges. It also outlines a vision for 2030 and identifies measures that are required in meeting them. A key aim in the strategy is to ensure that Finland´s maritime transport and maritime industries can operate effectively and that the competitiveness of the national economy and environmental and safety issues are taken extensively into account.
Russia’s WTO membership brings new opportunities to take advantage of waterborne transport in traffic movements between Finland and Russia. With the WTO accession, Russia’s inland waterways are opening up to foreign traffic and this will allow the opportunity to switch goods traffic increasingly to vessels travelling directly to the interior.
However, effective use of the waterborne transport system will require further development of the operating environment. The adoption of electronic documentation and development of an intelligent transport network will facilitate and standardise the border 66 crossing procedures in Russia. Developing goods and passenger transport will require renewal of the ageing fleet of vessels. A potential abolition of visa requirements between the EU and Russia would probably boost tourism flows from Russia to Finland and thus increase the demand for various transport and accommodation services in Finland. A future bottleneck in the development of transit traffic will be a shortage of rail transport capacity between Finland and Russia, although improvements are planned, with double track between Luumäki and Imatra and improved arrangements at the Imatra border crossing.