A Review of Risk Assessment Methods for Arctic Shipping Routes

As sea ice recedes, the strategic importance of Arctic shipping routes has intensified, yet the complex polar environment poses severe challenges to navigational safety. Through a systematic search of the Scopus database, relevant key studies in both English and Chinese were identified and selected based on predefined inclusion criteria for in-depth review. The present study establishes a systematic categorization framework to parse existing research on Arctic navigational risk assessment. It structurally analyzes the literature across three core dimensions: sea ice characteristics, accident statistical analysis, and risk modeling methodologies. Addressing current limitations in data sparsity, factor coupling, and dynamic forecasting, this study proposes that future research should focus on the construction of structural models for risk interdependencies, multi-source data-driven environmental risk learning, and intelligent small-sample assessment based on Case-Based Reasoning (CBR), which extracts effective risk solutions from limited historical samples by interpreting past navigational successes and failures to improve decision quality. This review aims to provide a comprehensive reference for developing a systematic and intelligent risk assessment architecture for Arctic shipping.