With the rapid development of the maritime shipping industry, maritime emergencies show an increasing frequency and an expanding impact range. When only post-incident rescue dispatching is relied on, excessive response time and high dispatching cost are caused. To enhance maritime emergency capability, an optimization method for rescue-base location and scale configuration in high-risk areas was proposed. First, the impact of maritime risk factors on navigation safety was considered, and an accident analysis framework based on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and random forest was established to determine high-risk areas; then, the Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation Method (FCEM) was introduced to calculate the comprehensive impact index of interference factors on candidate locations for rescue bases. Finally, considering the supportive role of islands, a rescue equipment location and configuration model was developed with the objective of maximizing area coverage while minimizing configuration cost, and an improved multi-objective particle swarm optimization (IMOPSO) algorithm incorporating a derivation strategy and a sharing mechanism was designed to solve the model. Numerical experiment results for the South China Sea show that, compared with NSGA-Ⅱ and the standard multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MPOSO) algorithm, the proposed algorithm performs better in the uniformity and diversity of the Pareto solution set, the number of non-dominated solutions, and the solution time, with an overall improvement of 28. 88%~84.82%. Sensitivity analysis shows that both the coverage objective and the cost objective are significantly sensitive to response time and the number of candidate sites, and a trade-off between rescue timeliness and construction investment is required. Compared with the existing configuration scheme in the South China Sea, the optimized scheme reduces configuration cost by 13. 22% and increases sea-area coverage by 11. 98%, and the effectiveness and engineering applicability of the proposed method is validated.