Dubai Ranks Fifth in New Maritime Resilience Index and 12th Overall in DNV Study

The resilience measure is new this year. It placed Dubai alongside Singapore, Rotterdam, Shanghai and London in the top five, according to the report findings released through the Emirates News Agency. The report's authors treated a city's ability to coordinate, recover and reroute activity as an increasingly important test of maritime competitiveness, and credited Dubai's infrastructure, location and growing range of maritime businesses.

The ranking follows one of the hardest years for regional shipping, as conflict disrupted trade routes and supply chains across the Middle East. Dubai's port operators said the emirate's maritime sector and Jebel Ali port kept running at full capacity through the period, supported by coordination between government and private companies and a network of customs corridors, roads, rail links and free zones.

The biennial study assesses the top 50 maritime cities, selected from more than 15,000 cities with maritime activity, across five pillars: shipping centres, maritime finance and law, maritime technology, ports and logistics, and attractiveness and competitiveness. It combines objective data with the views of 208 senior industry figures worldwide.

Dubai's biggest gain came in the attractiveness and competitiveness pillar, where it climbed nine places from 15th to sixth, the largest improvement among cities in the top 15 across the 2024 and 2026 editions. Dubai and Abu Dhabi jointly topped the entrepreneurship index, and Dubai ranked second for human capital and joint fourth for global competitiveness.

The surveyed experts named Dubai the second most attractive city in the world for maritime company headquarters, citing its international connections and position between major regions. They also ranked it third among cities expected to lead the global maritime industry over the next five years, ahead of Rotterdam and London.

Sultan Abdullah bin Dumaithan, chairman of the Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation, said the experts' verdict on Dubai as a headquarters location had been given at the height of the disruption, when companies had a difficult year in the emirate and chose to stay.

Ahmed Yousef Al Hassan, chief executive and managing director of DP World GCC, said the company had moved close to one million twenty-foot equivalent units of containers across the region through new routes and a multimodal transport network to keep trade flowing into Dubai, and that it planned to expand connectivity and give customers more options for moving goods in and out of the emirate.

The report was launched at the first Seatrade UAE summit in Dubai.