"The project aims to improve environmental sustainability and energy efficiency in the Italian and Croatian ports falling within the area of the Interreg Programme, both through specific actions aimed at reducing polluting emissions and by fostering greater institutional cooperation, aimed at creating a coordinated and permanent governance to manage environmental sustainability interventions in the port area and energy efficiency at cross-border level. In the Adriatic ports involved, in fact, pilot and pioneering actions have been set up through the project to intervene in various areas and criticalities, such as noise pollution, air quality, and CO2 emissions,' reads the press release.
There are three main interventions that the Port System Authority of the Southern Adriatic Sea has developed through the SUSPORT project. The first and most complex is the implementation in the southern Adriatic ports (Bari, Brindisi, Manfredonia, Barletta and Monopoli) of the integrated environmental monitoring application system called VEGA. This is a futuristic application that aims to improve the energy sustainability of maritime and multimodal transport in the ports, as well as to strengthen the environmental protection action with the installation of advanced consultation dashboards, through which heterogeneous data, such as the impact factor of infrastructure works, can be interpolated on the main environmental monitoring benchmarks.
The second is the purchase of two probes for measuring marine parameters in the ports of Bari and Brindisi.
The third is the purchase of two electric cars to replace two cars with Euro 4 emission classes.
"Our Entity groups together as many as six ports,' comments President Ugo Patroni Griffi, 'travel is frequent and necessary, not only for the management but also for all personnel. Precisely because of this, we wanted to make our contribution aimed at reducing atmospheric emissions, also in road transport. This is a further and important element that is part of the broader and more complex framework of management and strategic planning that we have prepared and which envisages, among other things, favouring the use of alternative and bio-lubricant fuels; the implementation of integrated port-hinterland connections; the reduction of emissions; the protection of biodiversity; and the adoption of CAM (Minimum Environmental Criteria). Measures,' Patroni Griffi concludes, 'aimed at making our ports more sustainable, modern, digital, and able to respond adequately to the challenge of decarbonisation.
