Splash Annual Review: Can everyone please calm down?
The newbie, aspiring writer comes to China and feels like he or she could write a 1,000-page epic. After a couple of years, they feel like 200 pages is more realistic. A decade passes and the same jaded person can barely put a page together, as the complexity of understanding the People’s Republic comes to bear.
There’s a similar, albeit inverse, pattern I find in covering shipping. For one, I learn something new every day – it remains an industry that fascinates. Secondly, each year seems to get more and more – and I can’t think of a better way of describing this – ‘mega newsy’.
The 2020s have seen seismic disruptions to shipping. From covid to war, this decade has been one long constant of massive, often interlinking news stories with 2023 being especially trying in terms of keeping the editorial plates (or should that be rotor sails?) spinning.
Splash journalists have been glued to multiple vessel tracking services all year, trying to keep pace with the hot topics such as the dark fleet, the action at the Panama and Suez Canals and the Black Sea, and always with the mission to bring readers as concise a global snapshot of the key facts, not confusing our readers with multiple updates of single strand stories.
It can be tiring for our team, but there is enormous satisfaction from the interaction we have with our growing reader base.
For all the grim headlines of war and drought, arguably, when looking from a long-term perspective, July 7 this year might have been the day with the biggest repercussions for shipping. That was the moment member states of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) adopted far more ambitious green targets, leapfrogging most regulatory and industry bodies in stipulating a pathway for shipping’s decarbonisation. Analysis shows how closely aligned the IMO’s revised greenhouse gas strategy is with science-based 1.5-degree targets, something which will require strong and rapid responses from the industry and governments across the world.
While avid readers will not be receiving Daily Splash, our free newsletter through to January 4, the site will be regularly updated.
Below is the year-end take by our cartoonist, The Freaky Wave. On behalf of all of the Splash team, I’d like to wish all our readers a merry festive season, and a calmer 2024.
