Final meeting with the Green Shipping Expert Group (GSEG)

Held on 21-22 September 2022 in Brussels, the GSEG gathered over 30 professionals in the final discussions towards the Zero Emissions Waterborne Transport (ZEWT) Partnership’s targets and its areas of intervention in line with the HE Work Programme. Other topics of discussion concerned the past waterborne transport EU research & Innovation projects presenting an overview of the work done in the relevant areas until now, as well as the future prospective of the way forward and how the GSEG will live after STEERER.

Among the participants, the STEERER Consortium and representatives from the EC actively contributed to the discussions together with the experts coming from all over Europe for this final phase.

During the first day, the GSEG discussed the ZEWT intervention areas – Sustainable Alternative Fuels, Electrification, Energy efficiency, Design & Retrofitting, Digital Green and Ports – and the proposed actions for each area that would enable the waterborne transport sector to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. During these discussions the participants embarked in a dedicated  exercise of reviewing and amending the proposals under each intervention areas,  also taking into account  the key actions based on the previous GSEG gatherings.

In a similar way the experts analysed the list of past and current RD&I projects proposed by the STEERER consortium. Over 80 projects were discussed on this occasion, most of them coming from the H2020 and FP7 programmes. The aim of this exercise was to outline which project outputs should be further considered within the ZEWT Partnership activities (projects), which project outputs should be supported via deployment funding mechanisms (e.g. the Innovation Fund, CEF, etc.) and where some gaps still need to be filled in. During the discussions it became clear that while many of these projects have good results, a number of their inputs would still need funding, and some other topics relevant to the ZEWT Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) still to be addressed in the coming future.

All information gathered during the discussions with the experts will subsequently be further analysed and refined by the STEERER consortium, and the consolidated results will be added into the final STEERER Advice to the  ZEWT Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda and its Implementation Plan. 

Last but not least, the topic of how to interact with the experts in the coming years and what is the role of the current GSEG group had been carefully addressed. It was agreed that the experts will be involved in the future both in direct consultations with the Partnership for the future updates of the ZEWT SRIA and also as part of the advisory bodies for some of the projects (e.g. NEEDS) that are part of or related to the Partnership activities.