International Maritime Organization

The International Maritime Organization is the global regulator of merchant shipping. A specialised agency of the United Nations with its headquarters in London, it brings together the world's maritime nations to agree common rules, because shipping is inherently international and a patchwork of purely national regulations would be unworkable for ships that trade between many countries. The IMO does not operate ships or inspect them itself; instead it creates the framework of conventions, codes and guidelines that flag states enact into their own law and enforce.

The IMO is the source of the three pillars of shipping regulation: SOLAS, governing safety of life at sea; MARPOL, governing pollution prevention; and STCW, governing the training and certification of seafarers. It has also produced a large body of further instruments, including the Load Line Convention, the COLREGs for preventing collisions, the Ballast Water Management Convention, the ISM and ISPS Codes, and the technical codes for carrying chemicals, gases and solid bulk cargoes. Its work is carried out through committees, notably the Maritime Safety Committee and the Marine Environment Protection Committee, which debate and adopt new measures and amendments.

In recent years the IMO's most prominent work has been on the environment, from the 2020 global sulphur cap to energy-efficiency measures such as the EEDI, EEXI and CII, and its evolving strategy to cut greenhouse-gas emissions from shipping toward net zero. Decisions are reached by consensus among member states, which makes the process deliberate but gives its instruments near-universal acceptance. Because an IMO convention, once ratified and in force, applies to virtually the entire world fleet, the organisation's decisions shape how every ship is designed, equipped, crewed and operated.