A background paper informing about the clustering approach that will be applied by the Programme is now available online.

It is still possible to register for the Annual Conference and General Assembly 2010. The deadline for hotel bookings is 31 May.

Call for paper - special issue in Maritime Policy and Management (MPM) on the topic “The geography of maritime transport - space as a perspective in maritime research and development”
(Guest Editors: Adolf K.Y. Ng and Gordon Wilmsmeier)

Registration for the Joint Annual Conference and General Assembly 2010 of the North Sea Region Programme and the North Sea Commission is now open. The event will take place 16-18 June in Stavanger, Norway.

The City of Hamburg will present a number of running INTERREG projects with partners from Hamburg. The exhibition will be shown 10-21 May in the Hamburg City Hall.

A TV Documentary Series in 12 episodes based on the North Sea Trail Project under the North Sea Programme is currently showing on Danish Regional Television.

The preliminary programme of the Joint Annual Conference and General Assembly 2010 is now available online.

The NMU project partner Rickard Bergqvist and Phanthian Zuesongdham published now "Intermodal Freight Transport – Infrastructure and Technology".

The Programme has launched an online user survey to get feedback on how the website is used by different target groups.

The NMU project dissemination group is glad to publish the fourth edition of the bi-annual NMU newsletter (April 2010). 

The first meeting of the NMU Project Steering Committee (PSC) and work-package leaders in 2010 took place on the Danish island of Fanø. From 25th to 27th March the project partners met to discuss achieved results and strategic issues of the NMU network.

At meeting No 6, held on 14-15 April in Groningen, the Monitoring Committee decided to postpone the 6th Call for Applications until further notice.

The Fifth Call for Applications is now closed. A total of 17 full applications and nine applications for extension have been submitted to the Secretariat.

The Living North Sea project was officially unveiled at an exciting event in Flanders, Belgium on the 26th March 2010. Representation was present from across the beneficiary countries and from the European Commission. Delegates were able to witness first hand the shocking damage and mortality of fish at a land drainage pumping station. A representative of the Flemish Environment Minister released glass eel upstream of the pumping station, collected by the project partners, and pledged that the ministry would create an inventory of these pumping stations in Flanders, and a priority list based on their impact on fish before the end of the year. It was then pledged that 90% of priority fish passage sites would be made passable to fish by 2015. On the basis of support like this, the LNS project beneficiaries look forward to providing the information and support to solve these critical problems for migrating fish throughout the North Sea Region.

The Joint Annual Conference 2010 will take place 16-17 June in Stavanger, Norway. The event will be arranged jointly with the North Sea Commission and feature a more integrated conference than previous years.  

Troels Bruun Jørgensen is the new National Contact Point for Denmark. The change is effective immediately.

The NMU pilot on “Maritime Transport & the Environment” (MT&E) started on Wednesday, March 3rd with a one day face-to-face session at the campus of Kiel University of Applied Sciences, Germany. More than 30 apprentices of shipping agent and NMU stakeholder “Sartori & Berger” and others enrolled for this first test of the newly developed module that focuses on the environmental impacts of shipping.

What is a service list, what are the benefits and what are we doing in the Smart Cities project?

Relevant professionals are hereby invited to submit a quotation for a design contract for the North Sea Region Programme.