What progress for UK ports?

Within a very few years, we have moved from a society largely undisturbed by the environmental effects of modern life, to one where the impacts of climate change are at the heart of environmental, transport, energy and even fiscal policies. This has changed the way we manage organisations. Resource efficiency has become central to corporate management, enhanced by the significant financial benefits attached to good resource usage. Ports have played their part in this process through mechanisms such as Ecoports, Greenport conferences, networking and the sharing of good practice.

 The introduction of environment management systems are routine in port management usually comparing very favourably with other sectors. More and more we apply the adage that we must ‘think locally to act globally’, which is correct, but there cannot be another industry like ours, that is so centrally placed to have a global impact on transport and the opportunity that exists to create real sustainable solutions. This cannot be done solely by the port community; we need changes in how we plan for the future and how Governments develop the policies which will influence what happens to the world today and tomorrow.

Historically, of course, ports have been viewed as dirty industry, a view enhanced by an apparent lack of environmental concern shown by the people that managed them. But ports were the machines that helped to stoke the fires of industry and the creation of wealth. Did it matter that in the process the environment suffered and, indeed, did anyone even think to ask the question? Ports were too important - too many people and too much industry relied on them. At the same time ships grew and handling methods improved and the quantities of cargo handled increased with ever greater efficiency. To live near a port was to accept that the local environment would be dirty and that the overflow of cargos such as coal dust was a part of everyday life.

Legal battles

As recently as the 1990s, an injunction was quashed against a movement from the local community to quell coal dust at a port in Wales because there were no legal or recognised limits to the amount of dust created through handling. While this is, in itself, indicative of the often very subjective way in which we manage the environment, the thinking behind that judgement is worth examining. For what the court said was that although there were no thresholds of dust levels that could be applied to determine nuisance, what was important was the port operator had done all they could to keep dust levels at a minimum and had worked with local communities to try and resolve their concerns.

 In other words, the movement of cargo was essential and with it a recognition that it was a dirty activity, but that by acknowledging this and by trying to do something about it, with rain guns and stack shapes etc, the port was showing responsibility and awareness of the needs of the environment. There will be many stories like this, indicative of the difficulty in trying to keep environmental issues to a minimum, but what they show is that port operators have always been aware of the responsibilities. We still have bulk cargos of course, but containerisation has changed the industry in almost every conceivable way and brought with it a new issue: the need to create deeper approaches and bigger facilities.

 Port expansion was considered one of the great environmental battles, on a similar scale to airport expansion or new motorways. The reason for this was that many ports are in estuaries which have globally important conservation value and port growth was (and still is) seen as an unacceptable aspect of economic growth. At the same time there has been a growth in legislation which protected the environment, including the EU Habitats Directive. This culminated in the UK with the decision that prevented the development of Dibden Bay container terminal. To understand the importance of this decision it is necessary to understand the thinking behind that decision and to show how things had moved.

Without any clear environmental objectives for the estuary, the port operators put considerable effort into designing a project that in their view would mitigate any environmental effects of the development. The public inquiry that examined these proposals decided not only that this was insufficient, but, critically, it also determined that port operator had not followed the due process of the Regulations. This would have required agreeing that the development had an adverse effect on the environment which could not be mitigated. This would have meant that the UK Government would have needed to determine whether there were Imperative Reasons of Overriding Public Importance (IROPI) for the scheme to go ahead; and, if so, for the port operator to compensate for those impacts. In other words, it was not that the port had not made strenuous efforts to build an environmentally acceptable project , it was that they may have taken the wrong approach and not done enough.

Regulatory and voluntary initiatives

Moving forward, the industry routinely designs facilities which accommodate the needs of the environment, with considerable success on how we might work with the legislation. In some cases this has been through the development of legal agreements as happened for port development on the Humber Estuary. In others, it has been through the development of voluntary initiatives, such as ESPO’s Code of Practice on the Birds and Habitats Directive. This document highlights some of the best examples across Europe of ports showing that they can work within environmental constraints. It covers development, dredging, conservation actions and explains how these can be applied to the legal processes. Much of this has been discussed extensively elsewhere and the successes have been celebrated, but does it leave residual issues and where does this take us in relation to the changing world we live in?

In short, ports have shown that they can operate in environmentally sensitive ways; they are more involved in estuary communities and management and port personnel routinely work with others to find solutions. Science is increasingly central to planning and decision making and more than ever, ports are in a position to influence planning rather than be subject to it. It is readily accepted that ports are the key to co-modality; the transition from road to rail starts with ports and the potential to increase the use of short sea shipping starts and ends with ports. To meet the challenges of the future, ports must develop new facilities designed to facilitate better transport solutions as well as operate in environmentally sensitive ways. But the regulatory process is still complex and far too slow, there are still no clear environmental objectives which ports could adopt and build into plans and, most importantly, there is still too often the view that port development is unnecessary and unnecessarily damaging to the environment. In the UK, the new Marine and Coastal Access Act states that the marine environment will be better managed with better regulation, clearer objectives, better planning regimes and better decision making. But as yet there has been little tangible evidence of outputs and marine industry awaits the next steps.

To help drive the UK planning process, the Government is preparing national policies on ports, energy and transport. It is also developing marine policy to influence planning and the decisions that will need to be made by marine managers, but to date we have seen little evidence of how far these policies will be integrated. Offshore wind farm projections for the UK announced recently state that 32GW of energy will be created by the year 2020 with up to 50,000 new jobs, all of which will need servicing from ports. New power stations fired with renewable energy sources will be built close to ports, reflecting that ports will be central to the movement of these fuels and short sea shipping and better co-modality will take traffic off already jammed and overloaded road and rail services. Finally, there are already plans for major carbon capture and storage developments near ports which could use depleted offshore oilfields via ports.

 If industry is taking on the challenges of the modern world to address climate change, it is going to be increasingly important that Governments make plans and decisions that help the process. Ports have shown that they can respond to environmental needs; maybe the time has come when at last we trust them to do it. But if we are going to succeed in tackling these globally important issues, we need to do so now because the planet won’t wait.