Port of Lisbon Maintenance Dredging in a Sensitive Environmental System
Type:
Presented during:
WODCON XX: "The Art of Dredging" - 2013, Brussels, Belgium
Authors:
Sá Pereira MT, Silveira Ramos R
Abstract: The Port of Lisbon borders 11 municipal districts and shares territory under its jurisdiction with the following protected areas: at a national level, the Tagus Estuary Nature Reserve, at a European level, a Special Protection Area, Site of Community Interest and Corine Biotype, and internationally, the Ramsar Convention, in an environment that is extremely sensitive from an environmental point of view.
Owing to its site on an estuary, the Port of Lisbon Authority (APL) regularly and systematically dredges the bottoms of its access channels and manoeuvring and anchorage basins.
The aim of this presentation is to report on the strategy adopted by the Port of Lisbon to obtain five-year environmental licenses by presenting a dredging plan, and a monitoring plan and procedures report to the environment, describing the existing situation in detail, presenting proposals for the sinking of dredged sediment, and providing information on future projects.
The presentation will also include projects of the APL in partnership with local municipal districts and the Ministry of the Environment to recover river bank areas and combat erosion. Finally, the presentation focuses on current projects to adapt the Port of Lisbon with a view to assuring the capacity to handle increasingly large ships, resulting from the continuing changes that are being noted in the world shipping fleet prior to the opening of the Panama Canal in 2014. These changes call for the available sea beds to be adapted not only at hub ports that will receive these ships, but also at other ports, such as the Port of Lisbon, which are set to see how the regular lines that use them replace their fleets with larger vessels.
Keywords: Port of Lisbon, dredging maintenance, environment, remediation, new projects