Project meeting in Porto ends with encouraging and promising plans for the autumn and winter ahead
As the ACCESS project advances and starts producing concrete and applicable plans for environmental management improvements in the participating sport organisations, the consortium came together in Porto to discuss challenges, opportunities and exchange different approaches these plans would require.
The meeting hosted by FC Porto at their Dragao stadium came after a summer which was marked by summarising the initial phase of the project which revolved around screenings, assessments and observations and which were turned into respective publications, now to be published soon by the project’s technical partners and put on the project audience’s disposal.
In the meantime, the four sport organisations – the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Danish and the Welsh Football Associations, as well as FC Porto started establishing each their own Circular City Committees – a body that would follow up the key conclusions, suggestions and pilot actions of the previous phase. The role of these Committees will simply be to interpret the findings and translate them into tangible and enabling actions for elevated environmental management by deploying the know-how, capacities and skills put together. The overview of the provisional compositions of the four Committees showed that the sport organisations wants to get closer and collaborate more with their key public authorities and agencies, as well as with selected private stakeholders involved in certain operations and processes. Very encouraging is that this motivation and objective is mutual as those stakeholders are indeed interested in such collaborations.
Based on each sport organisation’s aspirations and ongoing activities, the identified authorities which were invited to join the respective Committees, included city councils, waste, energy or transport authorities, various bodies responsible for climate resilience and climate actions, as well as academic institutions. The area of activity and expertise these stakeholders have reflects the plans the four sport oranisations plan to tackle. More about each Committee in detail in separate coverage soon.
The meeting ended with finetuning the upcoming online training series, which will be open for external audience and which will take place from October to February. Therefore, stay tuned, subscribe to our mailing list and social media in order to know more and avoid missing the registration!