{"id":4224,"date":"2026-09-09T13:43:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T12:43:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/?p=4224"},"modified":"2026-09-09T13:43:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T12:43:01","slug":"past-present-and-future-all-come-together-at-greenport-congress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/news\/news-greenport-congress\/past-present-and-future-all-come-together-at-greenport-congress\/","title":{"rendered":"Past, present and future all come together at GreenPort Congress"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are many excellent reasons to attend the 21st<\/sup> GreenPort Congress in Portsmouth next month, though few are likely to be quite as personal as that of Andreas Slotte, the Port of Helsinki\u2019s Head of Sustainability & HSEQ.<\/p>\n

Aside from the shared environmental ambitions common to all of those attending the annual green port gathering, Slotte is a huge fan of one Horatio Hornblower \u2013 the fictional Royal Navy officer whose career throughout the Napoleonic Wars is authentically detailed in 11 acclaimed novels by C.S. Forester.<\/p>\n

So the opportunity to make his first ever visit to Portsmouth \u2013 the historic home of the Royal Navy with its museums, ships like HMS Victory, and preserved dockyard \u2013 will allow Slotte to step from the books\u2019 pages into the reality.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m very interested in naval history, and I\u2019ve probably read all the Hornblower books 10 times or something like that, so I\u2019ll try and arrive a day early for GreenPort so I have time to visit all the places in Portsmouth,\u201d said Slotte.<\/p>\n

That mission accomplished, he will then be highlighting the Port of Helsinki\u2019s journey to deliver sustainable operations, doing so as one of the busiest passenger ports in Europe with more than 9 million passengers per year.<\/p>\n

The large numbers are driven by the very high frequency traffic between Helsinki and Tallinn in Estonia, with a Green Corridor in operation between the two ports across the Gulf of Finland.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started it together with the Port of Tallinn, with both the ports of Helsinki and Tallinn in cooperation, then we have three shipping companies, the municipalities of Helsinki and Tallinn, and also the Estonian Ministry for the Climate, so it’s quite a large group,\u201d observed Slotte, adding: \u201cI think that’s quite unusual to have so many different parties.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Helsinki\u2019s contribution to GreenPort he said: \u201cIt’s going to be on our biodiversity action plans for ports, and we’ve just finished compiling our first version of our first plan. So I’m going to be talking about the process and how we ended up doing it, to summarise the work that we’ve done, the main conclusions, the barriers.<\/p>\n

\u201cHopefully I\u2019ll be able to lower the perceived barriers of doing this in a port, because we had quite a lot of thoughts ourselves that this is going to be difficult and that this can’t really be done \u2013 and then looking back at it all our worries were for nothing. It actually turned out to be quite easy to get going. So hopefully that would be something that I could contribute.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Port of Helsinki, like Portsmouth, is owned by the city, a more common occurrence in Europe than the UK, and both have been down the route to providing shore power, with a similar focus on large ferries and cruise ships.<\/p>\n

For Slotte, who has both Master Mariner and economics MBA certificates on his CV, GreenPort, which he has attended several times, offers a unique opportunity to focus in on the port sector specifically, and to compare notes and exchange ideas \u2013 \u201cIt’s just very useful, plain and simple\u201d.<\/p>\n

As for the biggest challenges in the short sea shipping sector: \u201cThere’s a general uncertainty regarding the future with all these new regulations from the EU that are coming into effect. So you have the emission trading scheme, which is one, and then the maritime fuel demands on vessels and their emissions, and then you have the demands on port investments for onshore power.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen you have a question mark regarding the IMO. Are they going to implement something similar worldwide? There are hopes, to my understanding, that they could get some type of similar system worldwide. So how would these two systems work together? Because with all this cost increase, how can we make sure that we remain competitive?\u201d<\/p>\n

GreenPort will pose the questions, and potentially provide many of the answers. To book a place at the 2026 GreenPort Congress, 7-9 October, click HERE<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Helsinki\u2019s Andreas Slotte will welcome opportunity to embrace history and share port\u2019s biodiversity success<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":4226,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-4224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-greenport-congress"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4224"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4227,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4224\/revisions\/4227"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4224"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=4224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}