Rhine-Alpine News
20.02.2023
Crossing Borders with the Rhine – River as a Corridor
Source: For UN 2023 Water Conference by www.eyeopeners.eu
The Interregional Alliance for the Rhine-Alpine Corridor EGTC is honoured to be invited to contribute to the UN 2023 Water conference with fascinating stories from working and living along the Rhine River. The EGTC invites its members and network to take part in a call for action to re-establish the shared value of a cross-border organization’s challenges and successful collaborations. We believe that the EGTC members have the knowledge and understanding to share their river experiences from their own place of work and living.
The call for action is meant to involve observations and opinions on “How important and influencing is the Rhine River for the growth of the Rhine-Alpine Corridor, from your own perspective of work?” Please share couple of statements and one photo of the river from your area of work before 3 March 2022 to info@egtc-rhine-alpine.eu.
As a contribution to UN 2023 Water Conference in March 2023, we are documenting (with photos and statements) the history and future of the Rhine River as an accessibility corridor, economic entity, and social asset of the EGTC. We encourage you to take this opportunity to get involved and portray the cross-border connecting river stories significantly.
UN of Rivers – Who can speak better for water than rivers?
The voices of rivers, deltas and estuaries are seldom heard. Rivers are the key to human survival for the provision of fresh water, to facilitate transport or to produce renewable energy. At the same time, rivers are major polluters, carrying waste to the oceans. Together with universities and local NGOs and international experts, we aim to bridge the gap between nature and culture, between organic and man-made, and to develop new ways of engaging with diverse water bodies.
The proposal for UN 2023 Water Conference is to collectively develop commitments from international partners for the future of clean, accessible, drinkable, and socio-ecologically fair rivers, deltas and estuaries that benefit our oceans. In the run-up to the Conference, several documented walks around the world will be organised, to give rivers, estuaries, and watersheds a voice and to create a basis for a global initiative. Using social media and digital tools, we will engage a broader, younger audience in distinct locations around the world with the aim to accelerate change towards a more sustainable and just water world. Combining local stories with global narratives in a multi-scalar approach, enabling design-thinking and artistic interventions for the implementation of the Water Action Agenda.
Green shipping: experiences from EU funded projects
Source: Picture by Thanasis Papazacharias on Pixabay
CINEA collected inputs from the projects on legislative drivers, barriers, and technology gaps to feed-in EU policies addressing the transition to a greener shipping sector, to identify opportunities for market uptake for innovative sustainable solutions and their transferability to fishing fleets, and to provide suggestions for future areas to be addressed by EU funding programmes. CINEA organised a workshop to showcase CINEA EU funded projects in the area of green shipping on 8 December 2022, to discuss:
- The contribution of a selection of EU funded projects under EMFF, Horizon 2020, CEF Transport and Innovation Fund to the decarbonisation of the shipping sector;
- The framework conditions that can facilitate the development, market uptake, and transferability to fishing fleets of sustainable innovative solutions;
- Ongoing and forthcoming EU initiatives addressing green shipping.
The event was an opportunity for sharing knowledge between organisations that are implementing on the ground solutions for green shipping, and EU policy makers. The presentations are now available on the event webpage. See full article here.
LANUV report on the effects of inland shipping NOx emissions on urban air quality
Source: logport II_Copyright_duisport_Rolf Köppen
The German journal “Immissionsschutz” published an article on the EU Clean INland SHipping (CLINSH) outcomes of the Landesamtes für Natur, Umwelt und Verbraucherschutz (LANUV). This article is the first in a series on the causes of air pollution at inland ports. It displays the relative contributions of the various emission groups to the measured air pollution as well as the unique effects of inland navigation on city air quality. The simulation studies have demonstrated that the impact of NOX emissions from port operations is primarily local. Although the Rhine’s traffic has a significant impact on the area along the river, it makes a negligible contribution to the city’s congested streets’ air pollution (and thus to the exceedances of the EU limit values). Using the thorough emission inventory kept at LANUV and the novel techniques for calculating ship emissions, they were able to simulate air pollution. There is very strong agreement between these modeled values and the air pollution levels that were actually measured for CLINSH, according to a comparison of the two. The full article is published here. Source: https://www.inlandwaterwaytransport.eu/lanuv-report-on-the-effects-of-inland-shipping-nox-emissions-on-urban-air-quality/