On June 16th the first virtual testing Lab has been focused on Malta; 37 members of universities, sectoral agencies, business support organizations, SMEs, interest groups, and national public authorities, gathered to sketch a BE plan of the region to support the regional Blue Deal Alliances.
Because of the restrictions, deriving from the COVID-19 lockdown the original framework planned for a face-to-face workshop has been modified and rethought to be applied virtually: thanks to remote co-working (and more than 50 hours meetings), an innovative framework was carried out.
The aim of a BLUE DEAL Lab is:
- To exploit partners’ interdisciplinary expertise and perform concrete planning and design simulations/demonstrations on specific shorelines.
- To perform on-site planning processes and produce widely agreed blue energy plans in the target region;
- To deliver comprehensive 2030-2050 visions of target shorelines and integrated sets of BE solutions;
- To develop activities of knowledge transfer, capacity building, and co-working sessions;
- To produce a BE potential analysis, a Blue Energy Plan, and a graphic synthesis to present them to the local community on the last day.
The final goal of the Labs is to carry out a joint plan for portability to allow the replicability of this process everywhere in the Mediterranean Area.
Every partner had its role in this process based on its specific competencies and the output of each partner is the input for the work of another partner.
Geoimaging made a 3D modeling and visual assessment of selected Blue Energy technologies.
The next testing Lab will carry out in Durazzo (AL) in the middle of September hosted by AKBN. The objective is to implement and develop this framework expanding the contribution to all the partners and amplify and diversify stakeholders who will take part in the workshop.
