Energy, world grain supplies, consumer goods – so much more: ships transport a remarkable 90 per cent of the world’s commodities. As the UN’s Secretary-General António Guterres said: “Without ships and the women and men who work on them, economies would stall, and people would starve.”

Founded by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) back in 2011, the Day of the Seafarer is on the 25th of June – so this episode we are looking at how EU funding is working to make life at sea, safer – for passengers and for crew.

Franz Evegren, is director of the Fire Safe Transport Department at the Research Institutes of Sweden. Franz focuses ways to reduce the number of fires on board roll-on/roll-off car ferries. Luis Sanchez-Heres, is also at the Research Institutes of Sweden where he is working on harnessing the power of Ai and machine learning to improve location pin pointing. Lazaros Karagiannidis is concentrating on how smart applications and wearables can make ship evacuations faster and safer. Lazaros is based at the National Technical University of Athens.

For more info on the projects featured, visit: https://europa.eu/!qD7RNV