1.   The fires caused widespread smogs, limiting visibility and forcing the closure of airports and shipping lanes.

2.   Japan is also looking for ways to use its coast guard to help police shipping lanes off Indonesia, where piracy and smuggling are rampant.

3.   Egypt, to the north, considers Red Sea shipping lanes to be of strategic importance.

4.   None of the islands in the China Sea is inhabited but many control fishing grounds and shipping lanes and are thought to sit on oil and gas fields.

5.   The feeding grounds where they filter plankton through their enormous baleen mouths are inshore, near shipping lanes and fishing boats.

6.   All the claimants bar Brunei have troops stationed in the area, which lies along important shipping lanes and could prove to be rich in mineral and oil resources.

7.   Singapore, an affluent island-republic at the mouth of the busy Malacca Straits shipping lanes, is a key regional transhipment hub.

8.   The Hanish archipelago, which both sides claim, guards access to strategic Red Sea shipping lanes.

9.   The island is one of nine in the archipelago at the southern mouth of the Red Sea and as such commands a strategic position in shipping lanes.