MAGPIE joined the Connecting Europe Days in Brussels alongside PIONEERS Ports, bringing the project’s work on greener, smarter and more efficient ports to the European transport community. The two projects shared Stand 8 in Grand Hall 1 + 2, while several MAGPIE partners contributed to the programme.
On 29 September, Martijn Streng from Erasmus University Rotterdam took part in the session New Market Opportunities for Inland Waterway Transport. Miguel Vieira de Castro from APS – Administração dos Portos de Sines e do Algarve joined a session on seafarers’ wellbeing and safer, more inclusive shipboard workplaces.
The following morning, Jérôme Besancenot from HAROPA PORT represented MAGPIE in Success Stories in Airports and Ports: Greening and Digitalisation – the Green Deal Projects, alongside representatives of other European Green Deal projects.
The session provided an opportunity to reflect on a point that is increasingly relevant to both ports and airports: the five projects were conceived in a very different energy landscape, back in 2019. Since then, energy security, geopolitics and decarbonisation have moved firmly to the centre of infrastructure planning. One consequence of this changing context is that sustainability is no longer something to be considered alongside long-term infrastructure planning; it is increasingly part of how transport infrastructure is planned in the first place.
This perspective echoed a point made by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in her opening speech at Connecting Europe Days: transport infrastructure is not built only for the present, but for the future.
That principle has been central to MAGPIE from the beginning. Over five years, the project has worked from a 2050 perspective, asking what European ports will need to operate in a changing energy, environmental and technological landscape. Many of the questions considered as long-term challenges are already confronting ports today.
The Green Innovation Compass brings the results of that work together in one platform, gathering the solutions, tools, lessons learned and implementation insights developed through MAGPIE. Rather than leaving these results within the project consortium, the Compass is intended to make them available to the wider port community.
Connecting Europe Days also offered an opportunity to mark the end of several neighbouring Green Deal projects working on the transformation of European airports. MAGPIE congratulates OLGA, STARGATE and TULIPS on completing their projects and was pleased to reconnect with partners who have shared the same European research and innovation landscape over the past five years.
The event closed with an unexpected visit to the MAGPIE and PIONEERS stand from Apostolos Tzitzikostas, European Commissioner for Sustainable Transport and Tourism. His visit provided a fitting conclusion to several days focused on how European transport infrastructure can respond to the challenges ahead.
For MAGPIE, the message was that, the project may be coming to an end, but its work is intended to remain in use. The Green Innovation Compass is part of that legacy, making the knowledge and solutions developed through the project available to ports planning their own transition.
