Every year the Inter­na­tion­al Mar­itime Orga­ni­za­tion (IMO) cel­e­brates World Mar­itime Day. This year, World Mar­itime Day is on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 26th. The World Mar­itime Day theme for 2016 is “Ship­ping: indis­pens­able to the world”. The theme was cho­sen to focus on the crit­i­cal link between ship­ping and glob­al soci­ety and to raise aware­ness of the rel­e­vance of the role of IMO as the glob­al reg­u­la­to­ry body for inter­na­tion­al ship­ping. The impor­tance of ship­ping to sup­port and sus­tain today’s glob­al soci­ety gives IMO’s work a sig­nif­i­cance that reach­es far beyond the indus­try itself.

Accord­ing to the Unit­ed Nations Con­fer­ence on Trade and Devel­op­ment (UNCTAD), around 80 per cent of glob­al trade by vol­ume and over 70 per cent of glob­al trade by val­ue are car­ried by sea and are han­dled by ports world­wide. These shares are even high­er in the case of most devel­op­ing coun­tries. With­out ship­ping the import and export of goods on the scale nec­es­sary to sus­tain the mod­ern world would not be possible.

Seaborne trade con­tin­ues to expand, bring­ing ben­e­fits for con­sumers across the world through com­pet­i­tive freight costs.

There are more than 50,000 mer­chant ships trad­ing inter­na­tion­al­ly, trans­port­ing every kind of car­go. The world fleet is reg­is­tered in over 150 nations and manned by more than a mil­lion sea­far­ers of vir­tu­al­ly every nationality.

Over the past 50 years and more, IMO has devel­oped and adopt­ed a com­pre­hen­sive frame­work of glob­al reg­u­la­tions cov­er­ing mar­itime safe­ty, envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion, legal mat­ters and oth­er areas. Under this reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work, ship­ping has become pro­gres­sive­ly safer, more effi­cient and more environment-friendly.