Your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. 

I am delighted to be back amongst friends of the maritime world, and it is a pleasure for me to address the Danish Maritime Forum once again. 

I hope you have had an inspiring and productive day filled with new inputs and fruitful discussions. 

As a seafaring nation, Denmark has many naval heroes. One of them is Iver Huitfeldt, who participated in a sea battle in Denmark on October 4th 1710. He sacrificed his ship, his crew and himself to save the rest of the Danish navy.

The Danish navy was cornered in a bay. Iver Huitfeldt faced a very uncertain future, but courage, training and many years at sea, facing new challenges everyday had prepared him for the choices he had to make.

He placed his ship between the Danish fleet and the enemy ships and when his ship caught fire he continued firing until his ship exploded. Thanks to his courage and swift reaction, the rest of the Danish navy was saved. 

The maritime world today is also full of choices and challenges, albeit not as violent as in Huitfeldt’s case. 

The choices you must make have consequences for growth, employment, the environment and prosperity. Hopefully, in the future you will not have to make the same personal sacrifices as our Danish hero. 

Uncertainty is difficult to accept and hard to handle when some of the parameters are outside your field of expertise. And in a complex and interdependent world such as ours it is impossible to know everything. 

To improve predictability in an uncertain maritime world, you need to work together across cultures, across borders and across regulators and different industries. When knowledge is shared, minds are broadened and know-how becomes expertise, you reduce the margins of uncertainty in your quest to find viable solutions.

I hope you will use the Danish Maritime Forum to work together to overcome some of the uncertainty that is even present in the maritime world. 

You are part of an industry that brings goods, food and fuel to all parts of the world, and together you play a crucial role in making the world go around. That is something to be proud of but also something that requires responsibility. 

I wish you – key stakeholders from all over the maritime world – a productive and inspiring Danish Maritime Forum.