During the ESPO (European Sea Ports Organisation) Conference, MAGPIE was asked by the organization to organize a joint breakout session with the PIONEERS project. PIONEERS is our sister project led by Port of Antwerp Bruges. In the Horizon 2020 Green Deal for Green ports and green airports call it was already mentioned that the winning projects would need to cooperate and share their results. We are very happy with the first steps that we have now taken in this respect. After some PIONEERS representatives attended our conference on 10 March, it was now the right time to organize something together. The next step will be in Lyon during the Connecting Europe Days (28-30 June), where the projects will have a stand together on the so called marketplace.
The breakout session was held in the open air just outside the conference location. During the breakout, both project coordinators (Inge de Wolf for PIONEERS and Arne-Jan Polman on behalf of MAGPIE) described the goals of the two green ports projects and explained how the consortia were formed. Next, discussions were held with the participants. Each participant received a role of a stakeholder, so they could suddenly become e.g. representatives of the port city, a refinery, an NGO or a port authority. This way, different perspectives were brought into the discussions on how we can pave the road towards smart green ports, how we can describe that process in a masterplan, how we should best inform and involve relevant stakeholders, and how we can stimulate maximal reproducibility of the project results towards the fellow ports. From both PIONEERS and MAGPIE, several project members were available to enrichen the discussions with their expert views. The format was very successful and we are definitely planning on using it again, both for MAGPIE purposes only, but also for future co-creation sessions with the PIONEERS consortium.
