A leaked draft of the EU’s multi-pronged plan to force shipping towards greener fuel choices confirms the worst fears of industry and green NGOs alike. Meanwhile there has been a significant increase in the bulker orderbook so far this year and Yantian Port starts to work its way through the box ship backlog

The frosty relationship between China and Australia has already affected trade in commodities such as coal, barley and cotton but Beijing will find it more difficult to find alternative suppliers of iron ore. Meanwhile, Lloyd’s List crunches the numbers on the boxship pile-up around China’s southern ports

Coronavirus knocked trillions of dollars off global GDP last year and resulted in economic momentum shifting away from western countries towards Asia. Technological developments kept the world moving, but an effective rollout of vaccines is needed for growth to return

Time will tell what lessons shipping has learnt from the pandemic-led disruption of this year, but 2021 will bring issues such as the transition to decarbonisation and digital integration closer to the fore

Clauses in charterparties that prohibit crew changes are undermining efforts to resolve the crew-change crisis and go against calls to designate seafarers as key workers, the International Maritime Organization has stressed

Selecting a list of the most influential people in shipping is never an easy task — there will always be those who disagree with certain inclusions, exclusions and positions within the top 100 and those disagreements will probably last until the following year. But in 2020, there was no dispute over who would be number one