African Ports Voluntarily Committing to Improving Their Sustainability Futures
African ports, under the Sustainable Ports Partnership (SPP) project between the World Bank and the Ports Management Association for West and Central Africa (PMAWCA), have begun developing an Environmental Sustainability Framework to provide a standard guide for scoring and rating a harmonised port environmental and social sustainability performance. The process, which is being facilitated by PENAf (Ports Environmental Network-Africa), kicked off on 29th April 2021 and will run till June 2022, after which the ports are expected to have built adequate capacity and financing mechanism for sustaining the partnership in the long term. The Partnership has set the tone for participating ports to evolve common environmental and social sustainability solutions together. It is providing them a cooperative mechanism for inclusive interaction to mutually build a common understanding of priority environmental sustainability risks and develop their own set of performance criteria for continuous environmental sustainability improvements while reducing negative impacts from their development and operations. To achieve this, participating ports have through virtual meetings, prioritised four issues – air quality, waste management, energy efficiency, and coastal erosion – and developing a sustainability scenario and benchmarks for an integrated and coherent approach to deepen their interest and commitment to continuous environmental and social sustainability improvement.
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