IAPH has announced the publication of a risk and resilience guideline for ports, alongside a risk inventory portal aimed at sharing best practices on risk mitigation and management for ports.
IAPH Managing Director, Patrick Verhoeven, said: “Applying the same pragmatic approach by the IAPH-WPSP COVID19 Taskforce, this guideline is the first IAPH tool produced by expert regular and associate members from this Committee which aims to support ports in establishing a structured approach towards risk management, business continuity and organisational preparedness.”
Capt. Niels Vanlaer, main author of the guidelines and Harbour Master of the Port of Antwerp-Bruges, wrote in the main text: “If we want to make our ports more resilient, we must make sure that we are prepared for disruptions and disasters: both the ones we identified as risk, but also the ones that come as a surprise.
“We must be ready to respond to those that we can respond to and be sufficiently flexible to improvise our response to the ones we cannot prepare for.
“Finally we must learn from our own incidents, but also be ready to share our incident history with other ports so that we can create mutual learning,” he added.
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To assist in this, IAPH has also established an online risk inventory portal which will act as a central hub for mutual learning from ports which have dealt with or which are proactively preparing for specific events and incidents.
In addition to containing the three crucial infographics that form the backbone of the guidelines, the portal offers the first two examples on how ports deal with specific threats, with illustrative case studies from member ports.
Patrick Verhoeven concluded: “Effectively managing business continuity during the next crisis has become an essential port requirement. This living document will evolve along the path of continuous improvement with our members.”
These two new publications come after a couple of months after IAPH released a report highlighting port infrastructure gaps, whereby several points of improvements regarding port performance were noted.
