Top Ten Maritime News Stories 11/06/2015

Seacurus Daily: Top Ten Maritime News Stories 11/06/2015

1. Singapore THE Maritime City

Singapore is the leading maritime city of the world, according to the recent report issued by Norwegian consultancy firm Menon. The report benchmarks the top maritime cities around the world in four maritime sectors: shipping, finance and law, technology, and ports and logistics. It also presents an overall assessment of the cities’ competitiveness and attractiveness to maritime companies, by using a broad set of objective indicators and building on a comprehensive survey among 200 industry experts located in 33 countries. Singapore has earned the spot because of its business friendly policies, and strategic location.

http://goo.gl/pcTThM

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2. Chronic Piracy Underreporting

Oceans Beyond Piracy has launched its fifth annual report detailing the economic and human costs of maritime piracy, citing a chronic under-reporting of piracy in the Gulf of Guinea. The region faces a variety of challenges related to chronic under-reporting of incidents and an absence of prosecutions. “We have observed that up to 70 percent of piracy-related incidents in the Gulf of Guinea are never reported, so we currently lack a complete understanding of the problem,” says Pottengal Mukundan, Director of the International Maritime Bureau. “This also makes it difficult to assess the extent of the threats seafarers face in this region.”

http://goo.gl/WSbbTn

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3. Mediterranean Hub for Shipping

The Mediterranean currently hosts 13 per cent of global shipping volumes, an increase of four per cent over 2005, reports Hellenic Shipping News of Piraeus. Shipping traffic in the region grew 123 per cent in the last 13 years, according to a study by Italian economic research group Studi e Ricerche per il Mezzogiorno (SRM).

The results of the annual report, called Italian Maritime Economy, showed that in 2013, the top 30 Mediterranean ports handled in 44 million TEU, up from 9.1 million in 1995, representing an increase of 382 per cent increase. In the last 10 years, the Mediterranean has greatly increased its traffic, and it will rise again.

http://goo.gl/ez6S46

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4. Walmart Forced to Shake Shipping

At Walmart’s annual meeting shareholders will vote on a measure that would force the company to reckon with one of the biggest sources of climate pollution in its vast global operations: shipping. No company moves as much stuff across the world’s oceans as Walmart does. A decade ago, Walmart began promoting itself as a sustainability leader. And, yet, in all the years since, the company has been silent about the environmental impacts of its massive shipping operations. It’s as though this core part of its business doesn’t exist. In fact, when Walmart reports its greenhouse gas emissions each year, it omits the pollution generated by shipping.

http://goo.gl/LFJbgI

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5. Piracy Victim and Hero

Indian maritime expert Chirag Bahri has won a prestigious international award for his efforts to rescue and support victims of piracy on the high seas. A survivor of maritime piracy himself, Bahri was among five individuals shortlisted for the prize. Bahri is regional director for South Asia of the Maritime Piracy Humanitarian Response Programme (MPHRP). In London June 9, he received the Dr Dierk Lindemann Welfare Personality of the Year Award at a ceremony organized at the International Maritime Organization (IMO). The event was hosted by the International Seafarers’ Welfare & Assistance Network (ISWAN).

http://goo.gl/ckMqsO

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6. Indian Seafarers Embrace Biometrics

The Indian Union Cabinet has approved the ratification of the International Labour Organisation convention number 185 on seafarers identity document (SID). Following the approval, a biometric-based seafarer’s identity document will be developed to ensure a foolproof security system to ward off breach of security and possible terror attacks. “The proposed SID has provisions for bar coding of biometrics-based identity of seafarers and a centralised database maintained in the issuing country, which can be accessed globally through an inter-operable and standard biometric template,” an official statement said.

http://goo.gl/JMYS9a

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7. Insurance Pay Out Racks Up

China’s insurance regulator estimates the payout in the fatal Yangtze cruise ship capsizing last week at around US$14.9 million, reported the official Xinhua news agency on Wednesday (June 10). The China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) announced in a conference that insurance firms underwrote 340 contracts for parties involved with the accident – which killed more than 400 people – ranging from shipowners and travel agencies to passengers and crew members. It has reported the ship – owned by Chongqing Eastern Shipping Corporation – was insured for US$2.5 million.

http://goo.gl/op5UMZ

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8. Dangerous ECDIS Delays

The next mandatory deadline for installation of digital bridge technology is at the end of this month and there is concern that owners are still not acting in time to be compliant, despite earlier warnings. The IMO has set out a rolling set of deadlines whereby all ships will have at least one system installed on board by mid-2019 at the latest. It is a rolling deadline, with the next one on July 1 applying to all tankers over 3,000 gt and built before July 1, 2012. Any tanker built after that date, and all newbuilding deliveries, need to have at least one ecdis on board. According to its data only 54% of more than 8,750 relevant tankers are using ECDIS.

http://goo.gl/ghEL6Z

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9. Understanding Sensors and Shipping

The Department of Engineering Cybernetics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) is studying collision avoidance for advanced ships. Recent advances in self-driving cars and other autonomous systems have shown that it is possible to achieve a high degree of situation awareness and autonomy using advanced sensor technology in combination with cleverly designed algorithms. Using this type of technology on oceangoing vehicles, while keeping the human in the loop, may be a key in reducing these types of accidents.

http://goo.gl/cxvWU9

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10. Piraeus Head Steps Down

The head of Greece’s biggest port Piraeus will step down, a statement said on Wednesday, after the port was once more named as a target for privatisation in the country’s cash-for-reforms negotiations with international creditors. Chief Executive Yiorgos Anomeritis has headed the port since 2009. In February, he had informed the new leftist-led government he would stay on until the company’s annual shareholder meeting — which takes place on Saturday — to help the government in their first months in power. Piraeus Port is majority state-owned and China’s Cosco has been operating two of the port’s cargo piers since 2008.

http://goo.gl/RoHwUX

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