Projects, technology, investments, and eco-friendly infrastructures to reduce carbon emissions in the shipping and transport sectors. These issues were the focus of the meeting held this morning in Livorno between the North Tyrrhenian Port Network Authority top management and a large Egyptian delegation led for the occasion by President Reda Ismail, the highest-ranking authority in the industry in the Egyptian Ministry of Infrastructure, which is responsible for coordinating the country’s port policies.
The periodic, fruitful exchange between the Port Network Authority (PNA) and the North African country has been further consolidated over the last few years thanks to the successful initiatives carried out in the European Life4Medeca project. The project’s closing event was celebrated yesterday in Livorno. It has led to a qualitative leap forward in strengthening the consolidated network of cooperation between the PNA and the Egyptian ports, in particular, with Damietta. Indeed, this morning, the groundwork for the drafting of a memorandum of understanding was successfully completed with Damietta. It is due to be signed over the next few weeks.
In addition to Reda Ismail and the chairman of Damietta Port Authority, Hasan Hawash (who attended via streaming), the meeting involved other influential representatives of Egyptian institutions, including the Dean of the Maritime College of the Arab Academy of Science and Technology, Mohi-Eldin M. Elsayeh and Suzan Kholeif representing Egypt’s National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries,. Paolo Dario, Emeritus Professor at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, and two Life4Medeca project partners also attended: Rafael Lobeto, of the Philippe Cousteau Foundation and Mario Dogliani, president of SDG4Med (Sustainable Development Goal for the Mediterranean), a non-profit association that aims to act as an ‘Observatory’ of the Sustainable Development Goals for the Mediterranean.
The discussion focused, among many other things, on the opportunities to intensify cooperation in the energy, technological innovation and environmental sustainability fields, leveraging the results achieved by the three-year Life4Medeca project, which has supported the process of setting up a low-sulphur emission area in Mediterranean waters, involving a growing number of non-European countries.
Translation by Giles Foster
