Neptune Atlas
War risk areas
A war risk area is not a report that something happened. It is a piece of water that underwriters have drawn a line around, and the commercial apparatus of a voyage through one, the premium, the notice, the crew bonus, the owner’s right to refuse, hangs off whether the ship is inside the line or outside it. That is a different question from whether there was an attack there last week, and the two are less connected than anybody expects.
What the Joint War Committee publishes
The Joint War Committee is a joint committee of the Lloyd’s Market Association and the International Underwriting Association, made up of underwriting representatives from the Lloyd’s and company markets who write marine hull war business in London. What it publishes is a list of areas, issued as numbered circulars and revised when the committee revises them rather than on a calendar.
Three things about that list are routinely overstated.
- It is a notification trigger, not a prohibition and not a price. Every circular carries the line that “the application of this list on individual contracts will be a matter for specific negotiation”, and the market association is explicit that rating is negotiated between underwriters and brokers and that the committee plays no part in it. The list decides who has to telephone the underwriter. The underwriter decides the number.
- It is not one kind of thing. The entries are a mixture: bare country names, sea areas defined by coordinates, sub-national regions, and conditional entries covering only, say, offshore installations in a particular economic zone. A named country carries its ports and its coastal waters out to twelve nautical miles unless the entry says otherwise. Anything that models this as a single list of rectangles has flattened four different shapes into one.
- It is a circular, not a feed. Revisions are event driven and irregular, and a boundary is therefore a fact with a circular number and a date on it. A tool that shows you the area without showing you which revision it came from has hidden the only thing worth checking.
Why the contract is written against a zone
The obvious product here is a map of red dots, one per attack, refreshed nightly. It is the wrong shape, and the reason is structural rather than aesthetic.
A hull war policy typically carries a navigation provision saying the ship shall not enter, sail for or deviate towards the waters in the current list. That works as a contract term because it is binary and determinable in advance: the master can know before he sails whether the voyage breaches it. An incident feed cannot do that job at all, because it is a record of what has already happened to somebody else.
The same endorsement then makes the point again from the other direction. When the committee revises the list, the revision does not automatically bite on a policy already written. It takes effect only once the underwriter gives notice, conventionally seven days. A contract that repriced itself continuously off live intelligence would be one where neither party could say what they were covered for at any given moment.
The charterparty side runs on the same logic. The standard war risk clauses define an Area as a port, place, area, zone, waterway or canal. A place, not an event. The owner’s right to refuse, the charterer’s obligation to reimburse and the adjustment to freight all key off whether the ship was ordered into an Area.
The Singapore Strait is the highest count of armed robbery anywhere on earth and carries no listing at all, because it is theft from ships underway and it does not change the cover. The Gulf of Guinea logs a small fraction of that count and has its own defined polygon, because what happens there is crew taken for ransom, and almost all of the world’s crew kidnappings come out of a very few incidents in that water. An incident feed measures how often something happened. A listed area encodes how bad it could be and who pays.
How the cover is put together
An ordinary hull and machinery policy excludes war, and cover for war, strikes, terrorism and related perils is bought back separately. Four features of that buy-back matter to a fixture.
- Piracy is not in it. This surprises almost everybody. The standard war and strikes wording excludes piracy, and piracy sits back in the ordinary hull policy, which excepts barratry and piracy from its own war exclusion. So “war risk cover” and “piracy cover” are not the same purchase, and a broker who assumes the war policy answers a hijacking has assumed wrongly.
- The premium is charged for the exposure. Entering a listed area attracts an additional premium, conventionally quoted as a percentage of the insured value of the hull and charged per transit or per call. On an expensive ship a fraction of a per cent is a large number, and in a deteriorating area those quotes move within days.
- Cancellation on notice is the lever underwriters actually pull. Either side may cancel the war cover on seven days’ notice, with underwriters agreeing to reinstate if a new rate or new conditions are agreed before the notice expires. That is how a region gets repriced. It sits alongside a separate and much rarer mechanism, automatic termination, which operates instantly and without notice on events such as the outbreak of war between certain named great powers or the requisition of the ship.
- Detention has its own clock. Where the ship is seized and the owner loses free use and disposal of her, the wording treats a continuous period of twelve months as a constructive total loss. A seizure is therefore not merely a delay problem.
Beside the hull cover sit the other purchases: excess war risks cover on the protection and indemnity side, since the clubs exclude war from ordinary cover; kidnap and ransom cover where the exposure is people rather than the ship; and loss of hire. Each is a separate contract with its own limits, and in the worst regions the war side carries lower sub-limits than elsewhere.
Who pays, under the charter
The standard war risk clauses for time and voyage charters were both revised in 2025, and the revision is worth knowing about because it tightened the definitions the money hangs on. Both give the owner the right to refuse to send the ship to, or to leave, an Area where in the reasonable judgement of the master or owners she may be exposed to war risks, whether or not that risk existed when the charter was made.
The allocation, in the ordinary case, runs like this. The owner carries the basic annual war risk premium on the hull. The charterer reimburses the additional premium for the area, and under the current time charter clause that reimbursement is due within a stated short period against the owner’s invoice. Crew bonuses and additional wages are likewise reimbursed by the charterer on proof of payment. The ship remains on hire while the clause is being complied with. On the voyage side, the freight is adjusted for the time and expense of a longer alternative route rather than by any fixed mileage threshold, which is a change from the older wording.
The crew bonus is a real figure rather than a token. Under the seafarers’ union terms, a designated warlike operations area entitles the crew to a bonus equal to their daily basic wage for the duration of the stay, subject to a minimum number of days, and to doubled death and disability compensation. Note also that the union maintains its own list of warlike areas, which is not the underwriters’ list and does not align with it.
One phrase, several different risks
| Water | What the exposure actually is | What it does to a fixture |
|---|---|---|
| Southern Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb | Standoff attack on the ship from the coast: missiles, drones, uncrewed craft | Premium per transit as a percentage of hull value, crew bonus, and a great many owners declining the passage outright |
| Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, Gulf of Oman | Interference and seizure by a state, and widespread interference with satellite navigation | Premium and notification on any call or transit. There is no routing round it: every berth in the Gulf is inside the area |
| Black Sea and Sea of Azov | A live war. Drones, missiles and mines, with ships hit in port as well as at sea | Cover quoted voyage by voyage, moving by multiples within weeks, and capable of being withdrawn |
| Gulf of Guinea | Kidnap of the crew for ransom, including well offshore | Hardening, citadel arrangements, sometimes an escort. The exposure is people, so the cover that responds is a different one |
| Somali basin and western Indian Ocean | Hijack of the whole ship for ransom, reaching far offshore | Reporting and hardening in the voluntary reporting area, on top of the listing |
| Singapore Strait | Theft from ships underway at night | Rarely touches the cover or the rate. A watchkeeping matter |
Missiles from a coast, seizure at a strait, kidnap offshore and pilfering at three in the morning are not one product, and an owner asked about each is having a different conversation. A tool that renders all of them as the same red rectangle has thrown away the only thing the broker needed to know.
One correction worth making while we are here, because it is repeated everywhere. The industry high risk area in the Indian Ocean was withdrawn at the start of 2023. It was not replaced by the voluntary reporting area: the reporting area already existed, was administered separately, and simply outlived it. And the withdrawal of the industry area did not remove anything from the underwriters’ list, which is a different instrument published by a different body. Two bodies moved in opposite directions at the same time, which is exactly the sort of thing a single red overlay cannot express.
The reroute is the decision
When an area gets bad enough the question stops being the premium and becomes the route. Going round the Cape of Good Hope rather than through Suez adds thousands of miles and well over a week to an Asia or Gulf to Europe voyage. It saves a canal toll and spends a great deal of fuel and a great many days.
Neither answer is obviously right and the arithmetic is not symmetric. Price both. Two operational costs travel with the direct route and belong in the days rather than the dollars: reporting and hardening take time, and where escorted or grouped transits are running, a ship waits for one. An estimate that prices the premium and not the delay has priced half of it.
Instructions that contradict themselves
A practical warning for anyone using or building a routing tool. “Avoid the Gulf of Guinea” on a voyage loading at Lagos cannot be honoured, because Lagos is inside it. Neither can “avoid the Black Sea” on a cargo to Constanta, nor “avoid the Gulf” on anything loading at Basrah. Taken literally, the ship can never leave the berth.
The right behaviour is neither to refuse nor to quietly route through anyway. It is to drop the impossible instruction for that leg and say which one was dropped, so the reader sees that they are loading inside it rather than seeing no route at all. Silence here is how a broker comes to believe a voyage avoided something it did not.
What none of this is
Approximate boundaries drawn over published areas are a planning aid. They are not the underwriter’s definition and they are not a statement of cover, and a ship can sit inside a listed area while outside anybody’s rectangle or the other way about. The market has in any case moved toward assessing individual voyages on top of the zones, taking account of the flag, the ownership and the counterparty as well as the position, none of which a map can show.
The zone is the contractual trigger. The intelligence is the price. Neither substitutes for the other, and the answer to every question on this page is the same and is not a screen: confirm the listed area, the additional premium, the notification requirement and the crew position with the underwriters and the club before quoting. What a desk needs from software is to be told the question exists on this voyage, early enough to ask it.
References
- Lloyd’s Market Association, Joint War Committee. Rating is a matter for individual negotiation between underwriters and brokers and the committee plays no role in it. lmalloyds.com
- International Underwriting Association, Joint War Committee Risk List, Listed Areas. iua.co.uk
- BIMCO, War Risks Clause for Time Chartering 2025 (CONWARTIME 2025), 2025. bimco.org
- BIMCO, War Risks Clause for Voyage Charter Parties 2025 (VOYWAR 2025), 2025. bimco.org
- ICC International Maritime Bureau, Global maritime piracy and armed robbery increased in 2025, 2026. icc-ccs.org
- International Transport Workers’ Federation, IBF Warlike and High Risk Areas. itfseafarers.org
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Neptune Atlas
Neptune Atlas draws war risk and piracy areas on the chart, tells you which ones a computed route actually passes through, and will route a leg round one so both answers can be priced side by side. The boxes are planning approximations of published areas and every answer says so. There is no incident feed behind them and there is deliberately not going to be one. Every paid plan starts with 7 free days. A card is needed to start them, and cancelling before they end costs nothing.
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