The government has earmarked between 175 and 200 million dollars for the four-year project, which will be overseen by the Sri Lanka Port Authority. The scheme includes plans for a cruise terminal and numerous hotels, along with leisure and water sports facilities. It is expected to emphasise the port city’s history and identity. However, some are concerned about the project’s potential impact on the UNESCO heritage site. Measures are set to be taken to protect marine wildlife. Meanwhile, a further 40 hectares of land will be reclaimed from the sea, by re-using dredged materials.

Maputo (Mozambique), the Ministry of Marine, Inland Waters and Fisheries, and Blue Forest are collaborating in a project to restore 185,000 hectares of mangrove forests that had been compromised by human activities. This 30 year long project will be implemented in Sofala and Zambezia, coastal provinces bordering the Indian Ocean, home to coral reefs and a significant biodiversity. The mangrove restoration will provide shelter, breeding grounds, and nurseries for fish and will help capture CO₂ as an important carbon sink. High-resolution satellite imagery, LiDAR technology, and remote sensing will be used to identify the areas were restoration is most needed. The project aims to plant 100 million trees and offset 200 thousand tons of CO₂ emissions per year. It will be financed through carbon credits generated by the reforestation and conservation activities.

With occasion of the One Ocean Summit, where AIVP also hosted a forum on green port cities, private companies announced several environmental commitments, for example, regarding plastics. Luxury cruise company Ponant communicated that single-use plastics would be removed from Ponant ships this year. In the same summit, Rodolphe Saadé, Chairman and CEO of the CMA CGM Group, announced that his group would no longer be transporting any plastic waste aboard its ships. This decision will be effective starting June 2022 to prevent this type of waste from being exported to destinations where sorting, recycling or recovery cannot be assured.

The new volume by Theo Notteboom, Athanasios Pallis and Jean-Paul Rodrigue entitled “Port Economics, Management and Policy, provides a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary port industry, showing how ports are organized to serve the global economy and support regional and local development. This textbook examines a wide range of seaport topics, covering maritime shipping and international trade, port terminals, port governance, port competition, port policy and much more. The content of the book is available open source in the website: https://porteconomicsmanagement.org/

During the One Ocean Summit held in Brest from February 9 to 11, more than twenty major European, East Asian and North American ports committed to reducing the environmental impact of ships in port by 2028, two years ahead of the 2030 target set by the European Commission. Indeed, the European objective is to reduce emissions by 55% by 2030, and even 75% for maritime transport. With the commitments made in Brest, the twenty or so ports concerned will even be ahead of this target as far as port calls are concerned. Thanks to a declaration initiated by France and on the occasion of a session organized by the AIVP, these ports have decided to work together on shore power supply as well as on the elaboration of green tariffs, i.e. port dues modulated according to a “bonus-malus” system.

The session organized by the AIVP was precisely on the “energy transition of port cites”, with very high level speakers from the ports of Singapore, Los Angeles and Long Beach, Marseille, Barcelona or Haropa Port (Le Havre, Rouen, Paris). Jean-Baptiste Djebbari, Minister of Transport (France) announced this declaration during a conclusion speech, which was welcomed by Adina-Ioana Valean, European Commissioner for Transport (EU), present that day to react officially to the debates led by the AIVP.