The European Parliament adopted by 428 votes to 46 with 11 abstentions a resolution tabled by the Committee on Transport and Tourism on NAIADES II – an action programme to support inland waterway transport, and welcomed the Commission’s initiative to update and renew the NAIADES programme by 2020. Whilst supporting the specific actions defined in the NAIADES II action programme 2014-2020, it regretted the fact that the Commission did not accompany the NAIADES II proposal with adequate and dedicated funding to achieve the goals of the action programme. Members therefore called for a well-structured policy with achievable short- and mid-term goals and a concrete roadmap that describes, inter alia, the resources for implementation. Concrete actions should take into account the specificities of a sector largely based on SMEs.
Underlining the importance of high-quality infrastructure as a condition for integrating inland waterway transport and inland ports into the trans-European transport network, Parliament called on the Commission and Member States to do the following:
- integrate all important bottlenecks into the corridor implementation plans to be adopted, noting the fact that the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) gave funding priority to the development of infrastructure for the greener modes of transport, such as inland waterways and improving cross-border sections of the core network;
- pay particular attention to free-flowing rivers which were close to their natural state and which could therefore be the subject of specific measures, and respecting EU environmental legislation, as indicated in Regulation (EU) No 1315/2013 on the trans-European transport network (TEN-T);
- speed up the integration of River Information Services (RIS), inland waterway transport market observation data and TEN-T corridor tools in order to support integrated multimodal transport governance;
- swiftly develop orientations to enable the integration of RIS data exchange into information streams of other transport modes in order to facilitate the integration of inland waterway transport with other transport modes
- support the uptake of best practice on integrating inland waterway transport services into multimodal logistics chains;
- come forward with options on how to leverage the reserve funds by using them in conjunction with financial instruments available under existing Union funds such as the CEF and from the European Investment Bank.