Vulnerability of Slovenian coastal area to oil pollution

In all EU countries the European legislation demands the preparation of a plan for the prevention of possible coastline contamination and of mitigation measures in such events. The legislation also states that such a plan should be rational and not too general. The Republic of Slovenia will need such a plan and this thesis, offering an overview of the types and vulnerability of the entire Slovene coastline, can be used as the basis for further studies of preventing oil pollution in the coastal area.\ud We first describe two categorizations of coastline types. The Fingas (2000) categorization covers all major types of world coastlines while Catto and Etheridge (2006) focus on North American coasts. Based on their studies we created a new categorization, which includes vulnerability indexes for every type of coastline present in Slovenia on a scale from 1 to 5. The basic ratings were further improved\ud with regards to some specific properties of each coastline section; the accessibility for cleanup efforts, special uses of the coastline sections and other properties were taken into account