Author: James Malcolm Page 1 of 4

We are delighted to publish the latest output in our Salient project exploring UK subsea infrastructure security.

This animated explainer video is designed to introduce the topic of subsea infrastructure security to a general audience. It outlines what subsea infrastructure is, why it is important to the United Kingdom, what risks the infrastructure faces and why multiple actors must work together to share information to improve the infrastructure’s security and resilience.

The embedded video includes captions. It is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. The video can be downloaded here. If you want a version without captions, and under the same license conditions, it can be downloaded here.

The sources used to support the development of the video were:

• Cabinet Office (2025), ‘National Security Strategy 2025: Security for the British People in a Dangerous World’. London: Cabinet Office.
• Kavanagh. C, Franken, J. He. W (2025) ‘Achieving Depth: Subsea Telecommunications Cables as Critical Infrastructure’. Geneva, Switzerland: UNIDIR.
• TeleGeography (2026), Submarine Cable Map. Accessed at: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
• Global Energy Monitor (2026) Global Gas Infrastructure Tracker. Accessed at: https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-gas-infrastructure-tracker 
• Global Energy Monitor (2026) Global Oil Infrastructure Tracker. Accessed at: https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-oil-infrastructure-tracker

We hope the video will prove useful in shedding further light on this important topic.

Our thanks both to our funders the Salient Hub and our design partners Digital Finch.

It was a pleasure to present initial findings from our project in Crete at the NATO Maritime Interdiction Operational Training Centre – NMIOTC annual conference. The NMIOTC conference is a wonderful space to connect and learn with an audience of policymakers and practitioners from around the world.

In our presentation we highlighted some of the key drivers and barriers to information sharing, including concerns raised during project data collection around threshold definition alignment for reporting/action between industry and government, alongside the challenge of over classification of information. We also introduced an initial framework for dissecting the characteristics of multi-actor information sharing that we hope can help establish a diagnostic and change toolkit.

We were grateful for the opportunity to get expert feedback and we will use these insights to further refine our project outputs.

Last week I had the immense pleasure to visit Tallinn on data collection duties for the project.

Alongside our visit to Helsinki late last year, we wanted to better understand how countries with considerable reason to think about their critical undersea infrastructure are approaching risk analysis and crisis management.

While these countries are obviously different to the UK, the lessons we can learn from how cross government and government to industry information sharing works, cannot be underestimated.

I am hugely indebted to those who spoke to me across Estonia’s government and industry and the spirit of openness and honesty that characterised our conversations. I learned a lot about the wider geopolitical context shaping CUI security, national response characteristics and the factors that are shaping information sharing day to day.

There is a lot to digest and I hope as a project team we can do justice to the insights gained in our planned project reports. Stay tuned!