This included seven newly-identified strategic directions for the organisation, in order to support the implementation of the UN’s sustainable development goals and the 2030 agenda for sustainable development.
The seven were:
*Improve implementation – ensuring regulations are effectively, efficiently and consistently implemented and enforced.
*Integrate new and advancing technologies in the regulatory framework - balancing the benefits derived from new and advancing technologies against safety and security concerns, the impact on the environment and on international trade facilitation, the potential costs to the industry, and their impact on personnel, both on board and ashore.
*Respond to climate change - developing appropriate, ambitious and realistic solutions to minimise shipping's contribution to air pollution and its impact on climate change.
*Engage in ocean governance – engaging in the processes and mechanisms by which the use of the oceans and their resources are regulated and controlled.
*Enhance global facilitation and security of international trade - addressing things like arrival and departure formalities, documentation and certification, and generally reducing the administrative burdens that surround ship operation.
*Ensure regulatory effectiveness - improving the actual process of developing regulations, to make them more effective; gathering more data, and being better and smarter at using it to make decisions; getting better feedback from member states and the industry and improving the way IMO learns from experience and feeds those lessons back into the regulatory process.
*Ensure organisational effectiveness - increasing the overall effectiveness of IMO, including the member states, non-governmental organisations, donors, the secretariat –all the many stakeholders in the organisation as a whole.
Among other resolutions, the IMO adopted revised procedures for Port State Control (PSC).
This resolution contains a comprehensive compilation of guidelines relevant to PSC, updating the previous procedures adopted in 2011 (resolution A.1052(27)). The revisions include, in particular, guidelines on the ISM Code; the certification of seafarers, hours of rest and manning; and procedures regarding voluntary early implementation of amendments to the 1974 SOLAS Convention and related mandatory instruments.
Also adopted was a resolution calling on states to consider ratifying a key treaty, which will provide a global regime for liability and compensation in the event of an incident involving the international or domestic carriage by sea of hazardous and noxious substances (HNS), such as chemicals, LPG and LNG.
The assembly adopted a resolution to allow for the delegation of authority to issue certificates of insurance under the International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage, 1992 (the 1992 Civil Liability Convention) and the 2010 HNS Convention.
Unlike the Bunkers Convention 2001, the 2002 Athens Convention and the 2007 Nairobi Wreck Removal Convention, the 1992 Civil Liability Convention and the 2010 HNS Convention do not provide an explicit framework for the delegation of authority to issue certificates of insurance.
This resolution confirmed that a state party to the 1992 Civil Liability Convention or the 2010 HNS Convention can authorise an institution or an organisation recognised by it to issue the certificates of insurance or other financial security required by these Conventions.
At the meeting, the 40-member IMO Council was elected for the next biennium - 2018 to 2019.