There is something quietly telling about a survey in which the respondents know exactly what the problem is and admit, with equal precision, that they cannot fix it. The 2025–2026 ICS Maritime Barometer attracted a record 185 C-suite responses from shipowners, managers, classification societies, port authorities, and insurers across 40 countries (p. 45). That record participation is not, in itself, a sign of optimism. It is a sign that the maritime sector has concluded that strategic ambiguity requires collective acknowledgment.
The report’s chairman frames it with the kind of restrained alarm that the British establishment reserves for genuine emergencies: “uncertainty is no longer treated as temporary disruption, but as a structural condition that must be actively managed” (p. 2). One could spend considerable time unpacking the distance between what that sentence implies and what the industry can actually do about it.
The answer, it turns out, is less than one might hope.
From risk management to environment management
For decades, the maritime sector managed maritime risk operationally. Weather, piracy, port congestion, crew shortages: these are problems with known mitigation tools. The model was coherent: identify the risk, apply the mitigation, move on. The sector became, over time, genuinely competent at absorbing them.
What the 2025–2026 Barometer documents is the strain on that model. The defining feature of this year’s findings is not that geopolitical instability ranks first for the fourth consecutive year (p. 4). It is that every other major maritime risk increasingly derives its intensity from it. Taken together, the Barometer’s data suggest that geopolitical instability is no longer a variable within the risk model. It has become the environment in which the model now operates. The industry is no longer managing events. It is adapting to a permanently unstable condition.
That distinction carries significant strategic weight. Risk management assumes that threats can be identified, bounded, and mitigated. Environment management assumes no such thing. It requires building organisations that can function under continuous external pressure, without the expectation of resolution. Viewed as a whole, the Barometer is a record of an entire industry making that transition in real time, driven not by choice but by the cumulative evidence of five consecutive years of data.
The mechanics of the multiplier
The Barometer introduces the concept of “risk stacking” (p. 9), and the mechanics deserve more than a passing mention, because they illustrate precisely what makes geopolitical instability different from every other threat on the maritime risk register.
Sanctions regimes alter which cargoes can move, on which vessels, under which flags, often with weeks of notice. Routing decisions collapse when chokepoints become contested: the Red Sea and Panama Canal demonstrated this with brutal efficiency across 2023 and 2024, forcing vessels onto Cape of Good Hope detours that added weeks to voyage times and significant fuel costs (p. 10, p. 30). Cyber exposure rises in direct proportion to political tension, as state-sponsored actors increasingly treat ports and logistics infrastructure as legitimate targets (p. 10). Regulatory frameworks fragment as states deploy trade measures and emissions rules as instruments of strategic leverage rather than governance tools (p. 11). Financing conditions tighten because political volatility feeds directly into risk premiums and the allocation of transition capital (p. 15). Crew management grows more complex as visa regimes and immigration controls respond to the same external pressures that affect everything else (p. 12).
None of these effects operates in isolation. Each amplifies the others. That is the multiplier the Barometer identifies, and it is why the report concludes that traditional siloed approaches to maritime risk management are “increasingly deemed insufficient” (p. 8). The maritime risk landscape has not simply become more dangerous. It has become structurally interconnected in ways that resist sequential management.
The confidence gap that defines the new order
The Barometer’s risk matrix produces a finding that is both simple and damning. The risks the industry fears most are precisely the ones it is least equipped to address (p. 8).
Political instability scores highest on maritime risk and lowest on confidence across all categories (p. 9). Cyber attacks rank second in risk and fifth in confidence, with that gap widening rather than closing despite rising investment (p. 10). Unilateral and regional regulations sit third in risk and fourth in confidence, and deteriorating (p. 11). In each case, the common thread is external origin. These are not problems the maritime sector created, and they are not problems it can resolve unilaterally. They require coordinated action between governments, regulators, and international bodies that, as the Barometer notes, is not currently forthcoming (p. 9).
The contrast with manageable risks is instructive. Supply chain instability, extreme weather, and pandemics all score comparatively high on confidence (pp. 16-17). The sector has learned to plan for those. It has built playbooks, redundancies, and response protocols that work. Policy volatility and strategic rivalry between states do not yield to playbooks. They yield, if at all, to diplomacy and multilateral coordination. Neither is currently in surplus. The broader implication is clear: when the industry that sustains global commerce cannot mitigate its primary maritime risks through its own actions, the problem has moved beyond the operational domain.
The fuel paradox: certainty of access beats ambition of outcome
If the risk findings document an industry adapting to a new environment rather than managing discrete threats, the fuel and technology data show what that adaptation looks like in practice.
LNG and biofuels jointly top the viability rankings at 51.35% each (p. 29). The Barometer is careful not to read this as endorsement of either fuel’s long-term credentials. LNG is chosen, the report suggests, because it is the only widely deployable fuel that can absorb compliance pressure, supply shocks, and policy volatility simultaneously (p. 30). Biofuels rank equally not out of conviction about their scalability, but because they are compatible with existing engines and bunkering infrastructure, allowing operators to reduce emissions without replacing fleets or rebuilding supply chains (p. 30). Both choices express the same underlying logic: in conditions of strategic ambiguity, certainty of access beats ambition of outcome.
Heavy fuel oil with abatement technology ranks third (p. 31), and its resilience points to cost-driven decision-making under sustained external pressure. The steepest falls complete the picture. Ammonia collapsed from 30.83% to 12.43% (p. 33). Hydrogen fell from over 18% to 10.27% (p. 34). Both require entirely new infrastructure ecosystems that a fragmented external environment is not delivering at the pace once anticipated. Nuclear, by contrast, rose to 19.46% (p. 33), driven by the recognition that energy independence from global bunkering networks carries strategic value precisely because those networks are exposed to the same geopolitical pressures that now define the maritime risk landscape. Across all fuel categories, the data points to the same conclusion: the choices of 2025–2026 are not a picture of decarbonisation ambition. They are environment management, expressed in procurement decisions.
The IMO Net-Zero delay: when institutions fail, fragmentation fills the gap
The Barometer’s Special Focus section addresses one of the most consequential regulatory non-events of the past year: the failure to adopt the IMO’s Net-Zero Framework at MEPC 84 in October 2025 (p. 40).
The headline figure is 57.84% of respondents reporting no change to existing plans (p. 40). That sounds stable until the Barometer deconstructs it. A significant portion of that cohort are organisations that had no plans to change precisely because they were waiting for the NZF to pass before deciding anything. The report is direct: “no change” in many cases means “still waiting,” not “still committed” (p. 40).
The remaining 42.16% is more instructive. Some 22.70% report pausing plans, 16.22% report modifying them, and 3.24% have cancelled outright (p. 40). Together, nearly 40% of the industry sits in tactical hold. The Barometer calls this a “decision deferral effect” (p. 41), and the mechanism is straightforward: the IMO’s delay has transferred risk from the regulator to the operator. The operators, applying the logic of environment management rather than event management, have responded by preserving optionality over commitment. With no global framework in place, regional regimes expand independently: the EU ETS is operational, the UK extends its emissions trading system to maritime from 2026, and several African states have introduced port-level carbon levies (p. 11). The result is not a coordinated transition but a patchwork of overlapping compliance obligations that larger operators can absorb and smaller ones cannot.
Shipowners no longer fear markets. They fear commitment
The Barometer’s Shipowner Focuss section (pp. 37-38) deserves particular attention, because shipowners are where environment management stops being a theoretical framework and becomes a daily operational reality.
For shipowners, political instability remains the primary maritime risk, felt through direct commercial exposure: scheduling disruptions, fleet deployment decisions, and contractual uncertainty absorbed at the asset level rather than managed from a strategic distance (p. 37). Administrative burden ranks second, higher than in the general sample, because policy volatility is operationalised at vessel level through compliance requirements, crew visa processing, and inconsistent port state procedures (p. 37). Stranded assets rank fourth for shipowners but lower in the overall sample (p. 38). The divergence reflects direct balance-sheet exposure: in conditions where the regulatory environment of 2035 cannot be modelled with any confidence, committing capital to a vessel whose compliance profile may be obsolete on delivery is not straightforwardly a business decision. It is a wager.
Shipowners no longer fear only market volatility. They fear committing capital into a regulatory future that nobody can define. Seen collectively, the shipowner data confirms what the wider Barometer suggests: environment management is not a strategic abstraction. It is what shipping companies are already doing.
The industry has stopped asking when uncertainty ends
The 2025–2026 ICS Maritime Barometer is, among other things, a leading indicator of where the broader global economy is heading. When the sector responsible for the physical movement of world trade cannot plan beyond a three-to-five-year horizon with confidence, that signal extends well beyond maritime risk.
The report speaks of resilience, adaptability, and diversification across fuels, technologies, and operational strategies (p. 43). That framing is accurate. But read in context, it is also a description of an industry that has internalised geopolitical instability as a permanent feature of its operating environment rather than a disruption to be resolved. Shipping once planned around markets. Markets fluctuated, but the underlying rules remained stable enough to plan against. That stability is gone.
The industry has stopped asking when uncertainty will end. It has started building business models on the assumption that it never will. In doing so, it has acknowledged something that extends far beyond the maritime risk register: the defining change of this decade was never risk itself. It was the environment in which risk now exists.
All data and findings cited in this analysis are drawn from the ICS Maritime Barometer Report 2025–2026, published by the International Chamber of Shipping. Page references are indicated throughout.