Lloyd's Register is classing the world's largest-ever container ships – led by a recent contract to oversee the building of six ultra-large container ships of more than 20,000 TEUs.

Drone ships may be the next generation of shipping. Rolls Royce recently launched a $7.2m autonomous ship project intended to pave the way for drone vessels.

Just one year after its announcement, Egypt's expanded Suez Canal is open for business. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi led the inauguration ceremony, which was attended by several Middle Eastern and European world leaders. The publicly-funded expansion cost about $8.5bn.

The IMO and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) should encourage cooperation between governments, research centers and companies to develop unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for search and rescue use, says Captain Abdelkhalik Kamal Eldin Soliman Selmy, a lecturer in the nautical department of the Arab Academy for Science and Technology and Maritime Transport in Egypt.

Shipowners operating in the trans-Atlantic dry bulk market, where prices have been plumbing two-year lows on the back of acute vessel oversupply and shifting patterns in minerals demand, could be facing brighter days, according to the latest special report released by Platts.

In 2014, renewable energy accounted for 9.8 percent of total domestic energy consumption. This marks the highest renewable energy share since the 1930s, when wood was a much larger contributor to domestic energy supply.