This month’s episode of Euronews Ocean explores how ports are adapting to become more sustainable, reducing their carbon footprint and contributing to the fight against climate change. We examine some of the solutions tried at the Port of Antwerp-Bruges in Belgium within the EU-funded PIONEERS research project.
In this bonus interview, Inge De Wolf, the PIONEERS project coordinator, highlights the benefit of bringing 46 international partners together to address this common challenge.
Inge De Wolf, PIONEERS project coordinator:
“Ports are often seen as a part of the problem. Especially here on the Antwerp platform, for example — it’s a cluster of logistics, maritime activities, we have a huge petrochemical cluster, so evidently we’re a source of pollution. But what we try to do as a port Authority is to become a part of the solution.
In the greening transition, you want to be impactful and you want to move forward — it’s something that you can just not do on your own. You need a lot of partners from different sectors to face the challenges and to make action happen. You need to reinvent yourself as an organisation. You need a lot of transparency, for example, data sharing, you need resilience, you need flexibility, you need efficiency. We have this horizon towards 2050 — we want to become a climate-neutral port.
Ideally, we would have this crystal ball that you see where you should go, but it’s just not what we have at the moment. So you learn as you go, right?”