Op-Ed: What SIRE 2.0 is really revealing about shipping

Speak to anyone in a technical or HSQE role and the same story comes back. The pressure has been building for years and the industry is now carrying more weight than its current systems can absorb. Expectations keep rising while the time, people and mental bandwidth needed to meet them have not. The gap is widening and it shows, not in isolated incidents, but everywhere you look across day-to-day operations.

SIRE 2.0 has brought this into sharp focus. While the previous approach was to avoid reporting deficiencies as the assumption was this would result in negative observations. Under SIRE 2.0, this behavior will directly result in a negative observation, so there is no room for non-reporting or convenient grey areas to hide behind. While the picture we are initially seeing is an increase in negative observations, we are finally beginning to see through a clearer and more transparent window.

RightShip is also adding a different kind of pressure for the dry bulk industry. The standards are not the issue—the speed at which updates arrive is. We are already grappling with the RISQ 3.2 update, which many believe has come too early. While in the tanker sector, managers are constantly recalibrating just to keep up, often while juggling the heavy lift of SIRE 2.0, PSC preparation and internal inspections. Teams are tired of being in a permanent state of adjustment. It is not resistance to higher expectations, but a simple acknowledgement that capacity has limits, and many feel they reached those limits some time ago.

Digitalization was supposed to ease the load, yet on many ships it has created its own kind of clutter. Crews are drowning in devices, apps and systems that rarely form a coherent workflow. Instead of clarity, they get noise. Instead of support, they get friction. The idea that every new problem should be met with another tool has backfired, and the fatigue is becoming obvious even if people are reluctant to say so openly. It is essential for managers to invest in the right technology that guides seafarers with focused solutions and apps that allow required workflows to be completed more efficiently.

On shore, inspections should bring all of this into a structured picture, yet far too often they land by email of disconnected files, stray photos and PDFs that never feed into a longer narrative. For all the talk about data driven operations, technical departments still spend an extraordinary amount of time hunting through email history and static documents for meaning that should be visible at a glance. Until that disconnect is addressed, no amount of analytics or AI will move the industry forward.

All of this is happening while experienced crew become harder to find, the regulatory burden climbs higher and technical departments try to manage processes that no longer match the scale or complexity of modern operations. The industry has leaned for too long on the willingness of teams to absorb the strain. That model has reached its limit.

The real question now is whether shipping is prepared to confront this moment honestly. Not with optimism or slogans, but with recognition of how fragmented technical management has become and how unrealistic the current load is for the people expected to carry it. The next year will not give the industry much choice. The pressure is rising, the old coping mechanisms are wearing thin and the cracks that have been ignored for too long are becoming impossible to look past.

Nick Vaughan is head of maritime at Kaiko Systems.

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