War, sanctions, dark fleets and cyber threats are forcing shipping companies to rethink what resilience actually means. At Oslo Ocean Days, senior figures from Gard, Skuld, Thommessen and DNV argued that the industry can still manage many of today’s risks — but only if global insurance structures remain intact, compliance rules are clear, companies invest in people and technology, and shipowners preserve enough flexibility to respond when the next disruption arrives.

The shipping industry has spent decades squeezing more efficiency out of vessels, networks and capital. But in a world where a geopolitical decision can alter a trade overnight, sanctions can affect the enforceability of insurance cover and a cyber attack can reach a ship’s operational systems, the value of maximum efficiency is increasingly being challenged by the value of flexibility.

That was the central theme of the panel “Why flexibility not efficiency is the new key to managing risk” at Oslo Ocean Days in Gamle Logen, Oslo.

Moderated by TradeWinds Editor-in-Chief Julian Bray, the discussion brought together Rolf Thore Roppestad, CEO of Gard; Ståle Hansen, President and CEO of Skuld; Henrik Hagberg, Partner at Thommessen; and Liv Hovem, CEO of DNV’s Accelerator business area.

Their perspectives ranged from P&I insurance and maritime law to sanctions, cyber security and energy transition. But the underlying message was consistent: geopolitical risk is no longer an external event that shipping companies can treat as a temporary exception. It is becoming part of the commercial operating environment.

TradeWinds’ own summary from Oslo highlighted the same themes, noting Hansen’s comments on the strong compliance of Chinese fleets and Roppestad’s warning that dark fleets and US-China trade tensions are putting pressure on the global P&I system.

Hagberg: Shipping is more prepared — but the compliance burden keeps expanding

For Henrik Hagberg, a partner at Norwegian law firm Thommessen, the critical change since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is not simply that risks have increased.

The industry has become more experienced in dealing with them.

Shipowners, insurers, brokers and lawyers have now spent several years working through war-risk exposure, sanctions restrictions and rapidly changing trading conditions. The sector is therefore better prepared than it was when the Black Sea crisis first forced companies to make decisions with limited precedent.

But preparedness has come alongside much greater complexity.

Hagberg said the concerns facing owners now extend well beyond the price of war-risk insurance. Sanctions compliance must be continuously reassessed, while the safety of crews and vessels and the potential environmental consequences of a casualty have become increasingly important parts of the decision-making process.

The result, he said, is much greater risk awareness — and a shipping business that has become fundamentally more complicated.

That perspective closely reflects Hagberg’s professional focus. Thommessen lists sanctions and export control, marine and energy insurance, crisis management, maritime casualty response and shipping among his core areas of expertise. The firm says he has been involved in the majority of major maritime casualties in Norwegian waters over the past decade.

The more difficult issue is what happens when regulatory measures alter market incentives.

During the panel, the discussion turned to the expansion of the dark fleet and the possibility that sanctions can have unintended consequences. Hagberg warned that moving more activity outside mainstream classification, insurance and regulatory oversight creates risks not only for the sanctioned trades themselves but also for coastal states and compliant shipping.

He described the dark fleet as a growing concern because vessels operating with weaker insurance, less transparent ownership or reduced regulatory oversight can leave governments and legitimate operators exposed when accidents occur.

The broader legal challenge is therefore not whether sanctions should exist, but whether rules are sufficiently clear for responsible operators to know where the boundary lies.

If compliant shipowners face uncertainty while less risk-sensitive operators can earn outsized returns by entering the same trade, the market can begin rewarding precisely the behaviour regulation was intended to discourage.

Hansen: Insurance can respond, but people still have to make the decisions

Ståle Hansen, President and CEO of Skuld, approached the risk discussion from the operational reality of a global marine insurer.

His assessment was that recent geopolitical crises have not overwhelmed the marine insurance system.

Skuld already has emergency procedures, crisis-response arrangements and an international network capable of responding when events escalate. The company operates through a network of 11 offices globally, a footprint also documented in Skuld’s corporate materials.

What changes in a crisis is the intensity of the workload.

Members need answers quickly. Insurers receive questions about cover, trading areas, sanctions, crew safety and operational exposure, and organisations have to make more people available for longer periods.

Hansen said each new crisis therefore becomes a learning exercise. Insurers build institutional knowledge, but they also need to educate a wider part of their organisations so more staff can handle scenarios that are becoming increasingly common rather than exceptional.

Importantly, the availability of insurance does not remove the operational decision.

Higher-risk areas can generally still be insured at a price, Hansen indicated, but the ultimate question can be much more basic: is it safe for the vessel and its crew to go?

That distinction matters in markets where high freight or charter rates can create strong financial incentives to enter riskier trades.

Insurance can transfer part of the financial exposure. It cannot eliminate the physical risk to people and assets.

China should not be equated with the dark fleet

Hansen also addressed an issue of particular relevance to the Chinese shipping market.

TradeWinds highlighted his assessment of the strong compliance of Chinese fleets, an important distinction at a time when China is frequently mentioned in the same context as Russian and Iranian oil flows and dark-fleet tankers.

The panel discussion made clear that the destination of a cargo should not be confused with the ownership or compliance status of the vessel carrying it.

A tanker delivering Iranian or Russian-linked oil to China may be owned or controlled from an entirely different jurisdiction. China’s role as a major commodity importer therefore does not mean the vessels serving those trades are Chinese-owned.

Hansen also pointed to the longstanding relationships Chinese market participants have developed with mainstream international insurance structures. His concern was less about China withdrawing from the existing system than about the wider risk of separate and increasingly segregated insurance systems emerging around different geopolitical blocs.

That would make international trade harder to manage, not easier.

Roppestad: Fragmenting the P&I pool would weaken protection for everyone

For Rolf Thore Roppestad, CEO of Gard, the debate goes beyond the balance sheet of an individual shipowner.

It reaches the architecture of the global marine liability system.

Roppestad has also served as Chair of the International Group of P&I Clubs since November 2025. The IG consists of 12 mutual P&I clubs that together insure almost 90% of the world fleet, sharing major claims through pooling and reinsurance arrangements.

That structure depends on scale.

The larger the pool of vessels and shipowners participating in a common system, the greater the financial capacity available to respond to major casualties.

Roppestad warned that dark-fleet growth and geopolitical fragmentation threaten that principle.

During the discussion, he described a P&I model built by shipowners over decades and covering the great majority of the conventional world fleet. If substantial parts of global shipping migrate outside that structure, the underlying pool of capital and risk becomes smaller.

The potential consequences are significant.

A casualty involving a mainstream insured ship and an inadequately insured vessel can leave the compliant party without an effective counterparty from which to recover costs. Funding for pollution response, wreck removal or other casualty expenses can become harder to secure, leaving local authorities more exposed.

Hansen also raised this counterparty problem during the panel, noting that accidents involving vessels outside recognised insurance structures can ultimately transfer costs from insurers to governments in the jurisdiction where the casualty occurs.

Roppestad’s argument is that this is not only a problem for vessels labelled “dark”.

It can weaken the system for everybody.

Sanctions can reshape who is willing to trade

Roppestad also challenged policymakers to consider the behavioural effects of unclear sanctions.

Where rules are clear, conventional shipowners can incorporate them into their compliance systems.

Where rules are uncertain or constantly changing, responsible operators may decide that the legal and reputational risks are too difficult to quantify.

Higher-risk operators, however, may see an opportunity.

As the panel put it, companies prepared to take substantially greater risk can enter markets offering “super profit”, while more conservatively managed operators stay away.

The outcome can be perverse: tighter restrictions may cause an increasing proportion of a trade to move into opaque ownership structures and weaker insurance arrangements.

Roppestad therefore argued strongly for preserving a broad international mutual system.

He described mutual P&I as particularly well suited to an uncertain world because clubs can collectively absorb major losses while retaining mechanisms to obtain additional capital from members if circumstances require it.

Gard’s public position has been consistent with that argument. When Roppestad became IG chair, he said that at a time when international frameworks and collaboration were under pressure, the global P&I system had become “perhaps more critical than ever” in ensuring that casualties, pollution clean-up and compensation are handled effectively.

His message in Oslo was therefore broader than a defence of marine insurance.

A fragmented trading world should not automatically be allowed to become a fragmented liability system.

Hovem: Cyber risk is no longer an IT problem

Liv Hovem, CEO of DNV’s Accelerator business area, introduced a different but increasingly connected dimension of resilience: cyber security.

DNV’s Accelerator is currently focused on scaling businesses in areas including cyber security and functional safety, while Hovem has extensive experience across the maritime and energy sectors.

Her starting point was the difference between insurance and assurance.

Insurance provides financial protection after risks materialise. DNV’s role as a classification and assurance organisation is to help reduce those risks through standards, verification, classification and technology assurance.

Cyber risk increasingly sits at the centre of that work.

Hovem said the industry has historically treated cyber security as an IT issue — something managed by an office-based technology department.

That distinction is disappearing.

Navigation systems, power systems and other operational technologies on board ships are increasingly digitalised and interconnected. The result is a larger attack surface and the possibility that a cyber incident can affect not only business data but the actual operation and safety of the vessel.

That is a fundamental change in maritime risk.

A cyber attack that interferes with propulsion, power or navigation is no longer simply a data-security event. It becomes an operational and potentially physical casualty risk.

Assume the attack will happen

Hovem also argued that the goal of cyber resilience cannot be to assume every attack can be prevented.

Attackers are becoming more sophisticated, she said, and artificial intelligence is giving them increasingly powerful tools.

AI can also help defenders, but the practical objective is to build systems capable of detecting attacks early and responding when prevention fails.

That means monitoring, emergency procedures, clearly defined responsibilities and training crews and shore personnel to know what to do when critical systems become unavailable.

“It’s not about avoiding an attack,” was the essence of her message. Companies have to be prepared for one to happen.

The same concept of resilience applies across other parts of the shipping business.

A company cannot guarantee that a shipping lane will remain open, that a sanctions regime will remain unchanged or that every digital system will always function.

It can, however, prepare alternatives.

Energy efficiency remains the safest bet in an uncertain fuel transition

Hovem extended the flexibility argument to shipping’s energy transition.

Owners still face major uncertainty over the fuels and technologies that will dominate vessel investment over the coming decades.

But she argued that this should not become an excuse for inaction.

Whatever the future fuel mix, improving a vessel’s energy efficiency remains economically rational because it reduces the amount of energy the ship needs in almost any future scenario.

Her message was that energy-efficiency measures remain one of the few investment decisions owners can make without having to correctly predict the winning fuel.

This is an important qualification to the panel’s headline proposition that flexibility is becoming more valuable than efficiency.

The discussion was not arguing against energy efficiency.

It was challenging the pursuit of an operating model so tightly optimised that there is no redundancy when conditions change.

There is a difference between reducing fuel consumption and eliminating every spare option from the system.

People and digital capability must advance together

The final theme of the discussion brought the four perspectives closer together: resilience ultimately depends on people.

Hansen said the insurance industry needs to invest simultaneously in workforce competence and digital development.

AI will provide powerful new tools, but models still require knowledgeable people who can test outputs and determine whether the answers make sense — particularly when geopolitical conditions are changing faster than historical datasets can capture.

He also stressed the value of the Norwegian maritime cluster, where insurers, shipowners and other maritime businesses can share knowledge across industry boundaries.

Hovem made a similar point from the technology side.

Cyber security involves distributed responsibilities: shipowners operate vessels, suppliers provide equipment and systems, and class societies perform assurance and verification.

But the risk itself is shared.

A cyber incident will not stop at the contractual boundary between owner, vendor and class.

For Hovem, one of the maritime industry’s strengths is therefore its ability to bring a relatively concentrated group of companies together, discuss common problems and develop collective responses.

The premium on optionality

The four speakers approached maritime resilience from very different positions.

Hagberg sees the legal and compliance landscape becoming more complicated even as industry experience improves.

Hansen sees a marine insurance industry capable of responding to geopolitical disruption, but increasingly dependent on trained people, fast decisions and strong international networks.

Roppestad sees the risk that sanctions, dark fleets and geopolitical rivalry could fragment a P&I system whose strength depends precisely on pooling risk across national boundaries.

Hovem sees the same resilience challenge emerging inside the ship itself, as digitalisation turns cyber attacks into operational risks and energy uncertainty forces owners to invest without knowing exactly which technologies will dominate 20 years from now.

Together, their remarks point to a change in the economics of shipping risk.

For decades, efficiency meant removing spare capacity, reducing costs and making every part of the system work harder.

In a more volatile world, some of what used to look like inefficiency may increasingly have a commercial value.

A second trading option. A stronger balance sheet. A recognised insurer. A well-trained crisis team. A cyber recovery procedure. A more energy-efficient vessel. A technology platform that does not lock the owner into one uncertain future.

Those things cost money.

But so does discovering, in the middle of a crisis, that the cheapest and most efficient operating model left no alternative when the assumptions behind it suddenly stopped being true.