About WEASTFLOWS

The project aims to increase sustainable freight transport, relieve congestion at key bottlenecks, remove technical barriers to modal shift and using ICT to make better use of existing infrastructure capacity in NWE, including by changing private sector behaviour. NWE manufacturing is increasingly outsourced and far eastern markets for NWE products are growing rapidly.

The project treats logistics in this global context. It also uses best practices from other densely populated areas via its observer network of other European and Global ports e.g. Zeebrugge, Shanghai. It focuses on the East West sustainable freight corridor across NWE, with underused port and sea transport capacity at the same time as heavily congested land infrastructures.

It helps integrate the peripheral western and northern regions of NWE and complements north south corridor initiatives such as Code 24. It was developed as a Strategic Initiative responding to the brief of the NWE programme authorities. It provides a platform for developing innovative ICT management systems and real life freight operational demonstrators. The project will show how to achieve higher productivity within the logistics industry and how targeted investment can improve the capacity of existing infrastructure.

Weastflows addresses the need for globally connected freight flows between the North West European Program area, the rest of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and China. It enables global logistics companies and port operators to work together under a neutral Interreg platform, overcoming boundaries e.g. a traditional reluctance to share amongst competitors.

It links the NWE east-west corridor to key crossroads with the North-South axis in Code 24. It will build on innovative but fragmented private sector experiments to share facilities and influence better environmental performance by freight companies. The 22 full partners (plus 15 observers) cover all NWE Member States except Switzerland. (source: official summary)

Evaluation of impacts and measure of benefits of the project

The department of geography is leader of Action 10 "Evalutation of impacts and measure of benefits of the project". This action is located in Work package 5 "Evaluation, demonstration and communication of the impacts and territorial benefits of this strategic initiative project". Our work will focus on:

• Regional Analysis
• SWOT Analysis
• Relationship between transportation, its infrastructure and space
• Identification of Regions for Case Studies