Achieve Greater Prosperity in Maritime Domain Through Collaborative Effort

Prosperity in Maritime Domain - Cooperated Maritime Security

The prosperity in most of the nations depends primarily on international trade and investments. In accordance, world economy heavily depends on maritime trade and commerce for their economic growth and prosperity. No country is entirely self-sufficient and almost whole countries needs maritime commerce to meet their trade needs, even though a littoral state, an island or a landlocked country. According to the statics, Ninety percent of world trade and two-thirds of energy supplies are carried by sea. Therefore, maritime transport is backbone of global trade and the economy.


The seas are enormous and complex, and it’s provide a substantial portion of the global population with food and livelihoods and are the means of transport for 80% of global trade. This trade routes are vulnerable and exposure to attack depends on their goods or materials of transporting. Therefore, international commerce is at risk in the major trading hubs as well as at a few of strategic choke-points. Many potential threats and vulnerabilities that could results catastrophic economic harm, loss of revenue, fuel violence and insecurity. These threats and vulnerabilities have many faces such as Transnational Organized Crimes including money laundering, illegal arms and drug traffic, piracy and Armed Robbery at Sea, Illegal Oil bunkering / Crude Oil Theft, Maritime Terrorism, Human trafficking, human smuggling and asylum seekers traveling by sea. Furthermore, Unreported and Unregulated fishing (IUU Fishing) and natural disasters, marine environmental degradation and climate change also coming under above threat classification.

The emerging concept of ‘Blue economy’ also explains that use of the sea and its resources for sustainable development. Basically this can be interpret as ocean-based economy and the resources includes spatial planning integrates conservation, oil and mineral wealth extraction, bio prospecting, sustainable energy production and marine transport. The Blue Economy will incorporate ocean values and services into economic modelling. Therefore, peaceful environment at sea to be there to achieve greater prosperity in maritime domain.

The main purpose of Maritime security is to ensure freedom of the seas, facilitate freedom of navigation and commerce, advance prosperity and freedom and protect the resources of the ocean. Every nations have a common interest to facilitate the vibrant maritime commerce that supports economic security and to protect against ocean-related terrorist, hostile, criminal, and dangerous acts. Since all nations benefit from this collective security, all nations must share in the responsibility for maintaining maritime security by countering the threats in this domain.’

Achieving safety and security at sea present a timeless challenge and to resolve this issue it is required to have collaborative effort among the nations with the support of standardized international strategic approach. This collective effort will be benefited to all nations and they all must share in the responsibility for maintaining maritime security by countering the identified threats in their respective regions. Therefore, few identified interconnecting elements to be discussed which directly impact on the inefficiency on maritime security environment including lack of maritime domain awareness, lack of cooperation and information sharing mechanism, less effectiveness of inter-agency dialogues and lack of resources for gathering information and surveillance.

In this context, this will be lengthy discussed and emphasized on the requirement of collaborative effort to mitigate identified maritime threats and promoting nations to work together to have peaceful environment at sea.