Abstract: Navigation in polar waters is complex, with numerous potential hazards and emergency scenarios. Ships operating in polar waters face challenging environmental factors including marine icing, cold temperatures, electromagnetic distortion, high winds, and low visibility. Resilience engineering is a recently developed system theory applied to the field of safety science. Resilience is the ability of a system to withstand a major disruption with acceptable degradation parameters, and the ability to recover within an acceptable time frame and with acceptable composite costs and risks. A resilient system depends on four abilities: learning, anticipation, monitoring, and response. The Navigational Risk Prevention and Control Resilient System in Polar Waters (NRPCRS-PW) is proposed to minimize the occurrence of marine transportation accidents in polar waters, to improve navigational risk prevention, and to control navigational ability. The NRPCRS-PW is developed according to the major connotations of resilience engineering and navigational risk in polar waters. The concepts and dependencies of resilience abilities related to environment and the key technologies of NRPCRS-PW are discussed based on five steps: environmental analysis, vulnerability mechanisms, risk forecasting, state monitoring, and crisis response. This research presents a method to improve risk control capacity in polar waters, which in turn contributes to safe, convenient, effective, and environmentally sensitive maritime transportation.

Key words: polar water, resilience engineering, navigational safety, risk prevention and control, framework design