Practical guidance on how to develop, adopt and update national maritime transport policy was the focus for a one-day seminar in Batumi, Georgia (14 September), aimed at senior maritime transport officials from the littoral States of the Black and Caspian Seas and Moldova. The seminar forms part of an on-going pilot project being rolled out by IMO on na-tional maritime transport policy development. A series of workshops and seminars have been held worldwide, to trial a maritime transport policy training package which is being developed by IMO and the World Maritime University (WMU) in order to provide training to interested IMO Member States in the development, adoption and updating of such policies, which are seen as key to a coordinated and integrated approach to maritime transport. The training package is expected to be finalized by the end of 2016. The Seminar was organized by IMO in cooperation with the Maritime Transport Agency of Georgia and with the involvement of WMU. It was held in conjunction with the Georgia International Maritime Forum (GIMF) 2016 which also took place in Batumi this week. Twenty participants from Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Islamic Republic of Iran, Moldova, Romania, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Ukraine attended the Seminar together with four other GIMF 2016 participants (from Kenya and Malaysia) who attended as observers.