Last Thursday 23 September, all Lille-based Interreg programmes managed by the Hauts-de-France Region welcomed a delegation from the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO, European Commission).
It was an opportunity for Slawomir Tokarski, who became director for Interreg programmes earlier this summer to get familiar with territorial cooperation, be it cross-border, transnational or interregional.
Interreg North-West Europe presented its impact in 2014-2020 as well as its key features for the next programming period (2021-2027). The afternoon was dedicated to a site visit at the Ports of Lille. The Ports of Lille are a major logistics, transportation and supply-chain actor in North-West Europe. They have been involved in two Interreg NWE projects:
- CCP 21 (2009-2014) aimed at streamlining freight transport thanks to a multimodal urban logistics platform
- ST4W - Smart Track 4 Waterway - (2017-2022) enabling a modal shift from road to river transportation based on IT tools and a close cooperation between all actors of the supply chain. By the end of the project, 6 million tons of goods/km will have shifted from road to waterway therefore contributing to making transport more sustainable, with less CO2 emissions for logistics operations.
Both projects demonstrate the tangible impact on the ground that EU funds have for the regions involved, and the beneficial long-term effects of transnational cooperation for major port cities across NWE.
