Region Skåne and TransBaltic hosted one of the workshops at the 3rd Interreg Forum in Stockholm. The workshop named "Infrastructure planninga and accessibility" gathered around 50 participants interested in the concept of green corridors and its impact on the accessibility and territorial cohesion of the Baltic Sea Region.
It featured a presentation of transnational Interreg projects active in transport-related matters and their joint work to make the green corridor concept proposed by the European Commission more customised to specific development conditions of the Baltic Sea Region.
‘It is time for Green Corridors 3.0' - said Jerker Sjögren, representative of the Swedish Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications, country's coordinator of the green corridors. He expressed words of acknowledgment for the ambitions of TransBaltic, EWTC II, Scandria, NECL II and other projects that created so called umbrella cooperation and underlined a need to better exploit their implementation results in the transport planning work at the national level.
The panellists, comprising the European Commission (DG REGIO), the Swedish Ministry and the featured projects, were anonymous to see more flexible solutions in the future Cohesion Policy. These should allow for stronger territorial dimension of transnational programmes (to respond to specific development needs) and more efficient inclusion of private stakeholders in the project implementation. The current projects shall be thus instrumental in supplying good evidence for the new placed-based Cohesion Policy. In pursuing the green corridor concept, they should do their utmost to build durable structures for public-private alliances (associations, cooperation platforms) and secure that both environmental and business benefits stemming from the concept are visible. Such evidence will be helpful also in the implementation of the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region as it will increase understanding between various sectors and create a win-win situation.