Monaco Smart & Sustainable Marina: a new booster of “blue innovation”
Approaching the paramount Monaco Yacht Show, a new unmissable event marked the Principality earlier this week. The first edition of Monaco Smart and Sustainable Marina was held on Monday the 20th September 2021 at the Yacht Club de Monaco under the umbrella of Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation and the Monaco Government’s Digital Transformation programme, known as Extended Monaco. This full-immersion summit represented a unique rendezvous for more than fifty start-ups from twenty-nine different Countries. That was just the final step of a weekly selection of more than a hundred candidates selected by Blumorpho, a corporate institution part of the international network focused on innovation as well as emerging new business models boosting a beneficial environmental and social impact. Each finalist had the precious opportunity to be included in a catalogue and to submit its project to a Technical Jury made of twenty-eight international representatives of the industry and investors.
“Considering the constant growth of the international yachting, it is essential to support worldwide the development of new destinations with an eco-sustainable approach”, underlined José Marco Casellini, CEO at Monaco Marina Management and event organizer – “scientific projects impose a great responsibility because the survival of the Planet depends on us using the resources at our disposal; the real challenge is then to reconcile high-tech innovation with the environment protection to design a better future”, he added.
“Innovation, Technical material, propulsion technology or clean solutions are crucial to collect data, this is also the purpose of this rendezvous back-to-back to the Monaco Yacht Show and I am confident that all roundtables will tackle for a more sustainable industry meeting the opportunities for investments”, stressed Olivier Wenden, Vice-President at Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation.
“Today is a great day to support the environmental commitment of the Principality by giving visibility to innovative realities”, reaffirmed in his opening speech Bernard D’Alessandri, General Secretary at the Yacht Club de Monaco. “The initiative has really grabbed the attention of young startup companies keen to penetrate the closed world of yachting, showing how proactive and creative they are”, pointed out Géraldine A. Gustin, CEO at Blumorpho.
“The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report published few weeks ago confirmed that the story is very serious; if we are staying on the existing projector grounded on a fossil fuel dependency, in the lifetime of our families and our children we will be in a world about 5°C higher than it is today with extreme consequences”, pointed out Marisa Drew, Chief Sustainability Officer & Global Head Sustainability Strategy, Advisory and Finance at Crédit Suisse – “if we are doing everything in our power to contain climate change we have hopes to stay in the red line which is about 1,5°C, that means reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 10% per year until 2050”, she added.
Biodiversity, energy optimization, water management, waste treatment, security, clean mobility are among the eighth pillars developed by all participants to implement the marina habitat. In order to better cope with all those issues, investing in innovative technologies is crucial provided that an eco-friendly Marina is a Smart City whose intelligence and sustainability are condensed.
“Marinas, in fact, are an interface that connects our cities to the marine ecosystem; their components, therefore, must satisfy different needs like service quality, personal safety, a sound economic management, a user-friendly adaptability to any environmental constraint…the ideal breeding ground for innovators ready to find solutions”, pointed out Héléna Bianchi, Jury Member and Vice-President of NGE Connect.
“Marinas are really specific places with a very high level of resources so that it is really pivotal to reduce any impact and to increase drastically clean energy efficiencies to boost biodiversity through new appliances that have to be tested”, concluded Nicolas Roche, Chemical Engineering Professor at Aix-Marseille University by adding: “that implies a fully interdisciplinary approach concerning all different issues like education; social, political and legal sciences; new economic indicators as well as computer science and digitalisation”.
Monaco Smart & Sustainable Marina kicked off a virtuous cycle to create a beneficial domino effect in the blue economy.
To know more about Monaco Smart & Sustainable Marina please visit: www.sustainablesmartmarina.com
