Shipping Is Safer Than Ever. So Why Does It Feel More Dangerous?

There is a number that should make every shipping professional feel good. In 2025, the global fleet recorded just 43 total vessel losses — ships over 100 gross tonnes that were written off completely. In the 1990s, the industry was losing over 200 ships a year. That decline, over three decades, is one of the most remarkable safety achievements in any major industry anywhere in the world.

And yet, if you ask almost anyone who works in shipping today — a ship manager, a marine superintendent, a port state control officer — they will tell you the industry feels more exposed, more unpredictable, and more tense than at any point in recent memory. Both things are true. Understanding why requires looking beyond the accident statistics, and that is precisely what Allianz Commercial did in its Safety and Shipping Review 2026, published last week.

The Numbers Tell One Story

The good news in the Allianz review is real. Reported shipping incidents fell by about 16% last year — 2,818 incidents globally in 2025 compared to 3,353 in 2024. Total vessel losses over the past five years have averaged 70 per year, down 37% from the five years before that. The long-term trend of improved safety — driven by better regulation, improved ship design, and more rigorous risk management — is holding.

The traditional causes of loss have not disappeared. Machinery damage and failure remains the single largest cause of shipping incidents, accounting for over half of all cases recorded last year. Fires and explosions came in at 218 incidents — still the second highest total over the past decade. A container ship catches fire somewhere in the world roughly every 17 days, according to Allianz data. For vehicle carriers, a fire is recorded every 37 days. Misdeclared and undeclared dangerous cargo remains the root cause in most of these cases — a problem that is entirely preventable, and yet persists.

Where the Old Risks End, New Ones Begin

The more significant finding in the 2026 review is not about accidents at all. It is about the nature of risk itself. Allianz describes what is happening in global shipping as a structural transformation — not a temporary disruption, but a lasting shift in the conditions under which the industry operates. The relatively stable, predictable world that shipping knew for decades — steady trade flows, reliable route security, broadly cooperative geopolitics — is unlikely to return.

The triggers are well known to anyone following the industry: Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, disruptions to the Panama Canal, sanctions-driven shadow fleet activity, rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait, and most recently, the conflict that brought commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to a near standstill. Each of these, on their own, would have been a significant event. Together, they represent something the industry has not faced before — simultaneous pressure on multiple strategic chokepoints at the same time.

The Hormuz Question That Changes Everything

Of all the recent disruptions, the Allianz review singles out the Strait of Hormuz as potentially the most consequential. To understand why, it helps to put it in context. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s — one of the most destructive conflicts in the modern Middle East — the Strait of Hormuz remained open to commercial shipping. What happened recently was, by that measure, unprecedented.

According to Allianz research data, at the height of the disruption, approximately 1,150 cargo-carrying vessels with a combined vessel and cargo value of around $125 billion were stranded in or around the Persian Gulf, unable to move. Roughly 20,000 seafarers were aboard those vessels, waiting. The mental strain placed on those men and women — many of them months into contracts, with families ashore and no clear date for relief — is something the numbers alone cannot capture.

The review also flags something that deserves close attention: reported proposals to impose transit fees on ships passing through the Strait. As Allianz notes, if such an idea were ever implemented, it would signal a profound shift in how the world thinks about freedom of navigation — turning what has always been a shared international principle into something that can be priced, tiered, or politically conditioned. The concern is not just Hormuz. It is that such a precedent, once set, could extend to any major chokepoint in the world.

What This Means for How Shipping Operates

The industry response is already visible. Shipowners and cargo operators are shifting — slowly but clearly — from what the review calls "just-in-time" thinking to "just-in-case" thinking. That means holding more buffer stock, building more flexibility into routing decisions, paying higher insurance premiums, and accepting that some costs once considered exceptional are now simply part of doing business. As Thomas Lillelund, CEO of Allianz Commercial, put it, resilience, geopolitics, and efficiency now have to be balanced in a world where uncertainty itself carries a price tag.

For seafarers, the implications are more immediate and more personal. Captain Rahul Khanna, Global Head of Marine Risk Consulting at Allianz Commercial, observed that for shipowners, the primary concern in the Hormuz situation was never simply about insurance cover — it was about the safety of their crew and their vessel when transiting a conflict zone. That is a significant observation. It is a reminder that behind every risk premium and every rerouting decision, there are people: officers, engineers, ratings — men and women doing their jobs in conditions that no employment contract ever truly prepares you for.

A Safer Industry in an Unsafe World

The Allianz Safety and Shipping Review 2026 lands on a simple but uncomfortable truth: the shipping industry has become genuinely safer at managing the risks it controls — engineering, maintenance, crew training, fire prevention. But the risks it cannot control — geopolitical conflict, sanctions, chokepoint closures, the normalization of attacks on commercial vessels — are growing faster than safety improvements can offset them.

For those of us who have spent careers in this industry, that is a sobering conclusion. We have worked hard, over many decades, to make ships safer, ports better, and crews more capable. None of that work is wasted. But the world that shipping now operates in demands something more than operational excellence. It demands resilience — in the broadest sense of the word. And it demands that the people at the sharp end of the industry, the seafarers who keep this all moving, are not forgotten in conversations that too often focus on rates, routes, and risk premiums.