MTCP - Maritime Transport Co-ordination Platform
Overview
Background & policy context:
At the time this project was carried out there was a growing imbalance between modes of transport in the European Union. The success of road and air transport resulted in ever-worsening congestion while failures to exploit the full potential of rail and short sea shipping, and in general of intermodal transport, impeded the development of real alternatives to road haulage. That situation, and its trend, which was forecast to push even more in this unsustainable direction, was leading to an uneven balance of modes on the main Trans-European network corridors.
90% of the EU external trade and 41% of the intra-EU trade in volume are transported by sea. Short sea shipping has shown an increase in growth rates over the last years, but it still offers an even larger capacity that should be exploited to re-balance the different transport modes.
In the light of the European Union's transport white paper of 2001, the Maritime Transport Coordination Platform (MTCP) was established to address the need to enhance the relevance of Europe's maritime research and education to matters of maritime policy related to sustainable surface transport, European competitiveness and safe, secure and efficient operation of maritime transport.
The MTCP was created in response to the DG TREN's call for Sustainable Surface Transport SUSTDEV-2002-3.3.1.3.12.
Objectives:
The technical objectives of the platform were to produce high quality, policy relevant, reports, specifications, forecasts, standard methodologies, decision support tools and information products.
Around fifteen targeted policy support studies addressing particular policy issues were undertaken during the 3 years of the MTCP. These studies, which will support the Commission's declared maritime transport priorities for the next decade, fall into the following categories:
- development and attractiveness of maritime transport (quality and efficiency);
- safety, security and environmental impact;
- maritime human resource in Europe (concerns on lack of future maritime human resource in Europe).
The MTCP set out to develop a Maritime Transport Sector Observatory (MTSO) to provide access to knowledge and data. This will be an integrating resource that will allow better use to be made of EU, national and other investments in data, information, research results and technical developments. Associated with the MTSO services is the provision of experts for short-term support to DG TREN.
The concept of the platform is a managed activity open to a wide range of European organisations. The activities and the membership have both fixed elements (for continuity) and flexible, adaptive parts in order to respond to changing policy imperatives over the life of the coordination action. A key feature is the engagement of stakeholders from customers, industry and government. General coverage of maritime transport was to be achieved by seven expert groups spanning the domain, reviewing developments, forecasting for their area and recommending areas that need deeper study in support of policy.
Methodology:
The concept of the platform is a managed activity open to a wide range of European organisations. The activities and the membership have both fixed elements (for continuity) and flexible, adaptive parts in order to respond to changing policy imperatives over the life of the coordination action. A key feature is the engagement of stakeholders from customers, industry and government. General coverage of maritime transport was achieved by seven expert groups spanning the domain, reviewing developments, forecasting for their area and recommending areas that need deeper study in support of policy (30% of budget). Targeted policy support studies addressing particular policy issues (15 studies over 3 years) were undertaken.
A comprehensive stakeholder engagement and dissemination programme provided effective access to the results and, critically, an important feedback into the conduct of the platform during its life.
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