Ships and seafarers increasingly caught in the crossfire of unrelated wars

The global shipping industry is facing a "genuinely unprecedented" convergence of maritime crises, with vessels and seafarers increasingly used as “leverage” in conflicts that have nothing to do with them.Four regions – the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea, the waters off Somalia, and the Black Sea – are now simultaneously active theatres of danger, on a scale the shipping industry has not seen before.Vessels and seafarers are being trapped and attacked in conflicts that have nothing to do with the ships themselves.Damien Chevalier the Director, of the Maritime Safety Division at the UN’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) spoke to UN News about the scale of the threat and what’s being done to protect ships and crews.What crisis is the shipping industry facing?This is the first time so many vessels and seafarers have been threatened across multiple regions at once. The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is unprecedented in terms of the number of vessels (2000) and seafarers (20,000) that were impacted at the beginning of the conflict.© IMODamien Chevallier, Director of the Maritime Safety Division at the International Maritime Organization (IMO).The industry now faces a combination...