Glossary
Maritime safety is the set of measures, regulations, and operational practices designed to protect people, vessels, cargo, and the marine environment from accidents, incidents, and harm at sea. It encompasses navigational safety, vessel seaworthiness, crew competency, emergency response, and adherence to international standards like the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) and the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs).
Governed globally by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), maritime safety is a legal requirement and an operational priority for every commercial shipping company worldwide.
Maritime safety isn’t an abstract compliance exercise. The consequences of getting it wrong are measured in lives, cargo, and hundreds of millions of dollars. Over 80% of world trade moves by sea, making the global shipping network one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure on the planet.
The scale of that network is growing. The world merchant fleet reached approximately 109,000 vessels of 100 GT and above in 2025 (the highest level ever recorded), with global capacity rising to around 2.4 billion deadweight tonnes (DWT), according to the Orca AI and NorthStandard safety report. More vessels operating across the same sea lanes means a structurally more congested and demanding environment for every bridge team.
The financial stakes reflect that reality. The same report puts the average cost of a collision claim at over USD 500,000 – and with average newbuild container ship prices exceeding USD 90 million in 2024, the total exposure from a single serious incident can be substantial. Maritime safety, in this context, is as much a commercial imperative as a regulatory one.
Maritime safety is a broad discipline and it doesn’t refer to a single rule or system. Instead, it’s a framework of overlapping areas, each with its own regulatory requirements, operational procedures, and risk profile.
| Regulation / Convention | Governing body | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| SOLAS (Safety of Life at Sea) | IMO | Minimum safety standards for ship construction, equipment, and operation |
| 1972 COLREGs | IMO | Rules of the road for preventing collisions at sea |
| STCW (Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping) | IMO | Crew competency and maritime safety training requirements |
| ISM Code (International Safety Management Code) | IMO | Safety management system requirements for ships and shipping companies |
| MARPOL | IMO | Prevention of vessel-source marine pollution |
| ISPS Code | IMO | Maritime safety and security requirements for ships and port facilities |
| MLC (Maritime Labour Convention) | ILO | Crew welfare, working conditions, and living standards |
At a national level, individual flag states may also enact their own maritime safety act legislation, such as the UK’s Marine Safety Act or Australia’s Marine Safety (Domestic Commercial Vessel) National Law 2012, which sit alongside IMO conventions and may impose additional requirements on vessels operating in their waters.
For the full list of IMO conventions and codes, the IMO maintains a complete reference on their website.
Human error is consistently identified as the primary cause, contributing to an estimated 75% of maritime accidents. Contributing factors include crew fatigue, poor watchkeeping, miscommunication, and non-compliance with COLREGs. Environmental conditions, equipment failure, and congested waterways are secondary factors, though they often interact with human factors to create incidents.
Collision and grounding are the most common serious incident types, and the conditions driving them are becoming structurally harder to manage. A growing fleet, persistent crew shortages, leaner bridge staffing, and increasing GNSS disruption and spoofing in geopolitically sensitive regions are all placing greater pressure on bridge teams. Conventional radar also has known limitations in detecting close-range, low-signature targets, leaving gaps in situational awareness that watchkeepers may not be aware of. The margin for error is narrowing at the same time as the demands on watchkeepers are increasing.
A maritime safety management system (SMS) is a structured framework that defines how a shipping company identifies hazards, manages risk, and ensures compliance with safety procedures across its fleet. Required under the ISM Code (part of SOLAS), an SMS covers everything from passage planning procedures to incident reporting and emergency drills.
The ISM Code (International Management Code for the Safe Operation of Ships and for Pollution Prevention) requires every shipping company to establish, implement, and maintain an SMS that meets a defined set of objectives. In practice, a well-functioning SMS translates those objectives into concrete operational standards: minimum passing distances, watchkeeping requirements, collision-avoidance procedures, rest-hour policies, and protocols for reporting near-misses and incidents.
Compliance with the ISM Code is verified through internal and external audits, with companies issued a Document of Compliance (DOC) and individual vessels issued a Safety Management Certificate (SMC). The challenge has always been the gap between documented procedures and what actually happens on the bridge. Audits capture a snapshot – they confirm that procedures exist and that crew are aware of them, but historically it has been very difficult to measure real-time adherence across a fleet at sea.
Maritime safety training covers the skills and knowledge required to operate safely at sea. Under the STCW Convention, officers and crew must hold certified competencies in watchkeeping, firefighting, survival at sea, medical first aid, and security awareness. Refresher training is required at defined intervals throughout a seafarer’s career.
Traditional maritime safety training is classroom or simulator-based: structured and largely disconnected from the specific conditions a crew will encounter on their own vessels. A growing trend is changing that. Onboard AI systems now generate real-event data from actual voyages, making it possible to run scenario-based training grounded in incidents from a company’s own fleet rather than generic simulations. This approach to human-AI collaboration means training is directly relevant to the routes, traffic conditions, and decision points crews will actually face.
Good maritime safety training should cover:
The risk environment facing commercial shipping is changing structurally, not just cyclically. According to the Orca AI and NorthStandard safety report, several overlapping pressures are converging, making safe navigation harder across the entire industry.
Orca AI’s platform is designed to address the intersection of human factors and navigation safety – an area where most serious incidents originate. Rather than adding another compliance layer, the platform gives bridge teams and shore-based safety managers the situational awareness and behavioral data they need to make better decisions, earlier.
The Orca AI SeaPod provides 24/7 monitoring using high-resolution day and thermal cameras combined with deep-learning models trained on maritime environments. It continuously detects, classifies, and tracks surrounding vessels and objects, including contacts not broadcasting on AIS, and prioritizes targets for the officer of the watch based on collision risk. By surfacing threats earlier and more reliably than visual watchkeeping alone, the SeaPod gives bridge teams the time and information needed to take measured, planned avoidance action rather than late or aggressive maneuvers.
Lloyd’s Register, one of the world’s leading classification societies, assessed the SeaPod’s detection performance during a five-day live voyage on a feeder containership through some of the Mediterranean’s busiest lanes, from Gioia Tauro to Marsaxlokk.
Tested alongside radar, AIS, and visual watchkeeping across 739 relevant targets, the system reached 94% precision and 98.6% recall, detecting small, unlit, and low-radar-signature craft that conventional radar did not always identify, including in night operations. Lloyd’s Register framed the value as AI supporting human decision-making in exactly the conditions where watchkeepers are most stretched.
FleetView gives safety managers fleet-wide visibility into navigational behavior, benchmarked against company SMS thresholds. Rate-of-turn events, minimum passing distances, and close encounter rates are aggregated across the fleet and reviewable at the vessel or route level. When deviations from SMS policy are identified, operators can follow up directly and feed real navigational scenarios from their own fleet into targeted crew training, closing the loop between data, behavior, and improvement.
The results from the Orca AI and NorthStandard safety report (covering 139 vessels over 12 months) show measurable, consistent improvement in navigational safety outcomes across the fleet:
The data reflects what AI is making possible at sea – not replacing the watchkeeper, but giving them better information, earlier, and giving safety managers the visibility to act on behavioral patterns before they become incidents.
