The Global Maritime Forum will hold its next annual summit in Athens, organisers announced on Friday.

The reveal came at the end of a two-day summit in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York.

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Forum chairman Jan Dieleman, who is also president of Cargill Ocean Transportation, said people had been asking him as the event neared its close where the next summit would be.

“It is a little bit of a giveaway, I think, if I ask two people to come to the stage,” he said.

Dieleman then invited Anthony Papadimitriou, the president of Athens’ Onassis Foundation, and Diana Shipping chief executive Semiramis Paliou to announce the site of the next summit.

To keep the guessing game going, Papadimitrou offered additional clues, including the fact that the chosen city had been a home of zero-carbon shipping as long as 5,000 years ago.

Next year’s event will take place on 18 and 19 October.

Global Maritime Forum, a Copenhagen-based nonprofit organisation that emerged out of the Danish Maritime Forum, has hatched key initiatives tackling key shipping industry challenges, including seafarer welfare and decarbonisation.

The annual summit has traditionally been the main vehicle for sparking collaboration to meet those challenges.

This year’s event focused on responding to two years of dramatic change that have included a global pandemic, a major war, a supply chain crisis and pressure to tackle greenhouse gas emissions.

Among announcements during the forum this year was a move by the Poseidon Principles for finance and marine insurance to commit to benchmarking portfolios in both groups to trajectories that would keep global warming at 1.5C.

They also both announced new members to the initiatives.

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