By unifying contents, our intention is none other than to show the total commitment by the Port Community of Barcelona to sustainable development from a broad perspective that encompasses both environmental and social and economic sustainability.

Today, the Port of Barcelona is the main logistics hub of southern Europe and the Mediterranean and handles goods worth more than €86 billion each year. The Port and its Logistics-Port Community comprise 450 companies and 41,000 workers, channelling over 80% of Catalonia's maritime trade and 22% of that of Spain as a whole.

We are a tool that helps companies in their internationalisation drive, making them more competitive by facilitating import and export operations. Boosting the economic sector is therefore one of the priority objectives facilitating commercial and logistics activities in a sustainable way. However, we cannot work in the present without considering the effects on the future. That is why we use digitalisation to become a smart port and move towards the ecological transition. These are two key aspects for facing the challenges of the future.

It is also important to remember that in this 2019 Report we want to make it clear that the entire Port of Barcelona, led by the Port Authority, has aligned its strategies with the Goals of the Agenda 2030 established by the United Nations. We begin our commitment to the SDGs by developing a series of actions, set out in this publication, to promote the emergence of a more egalitarian, inclusive and sustainable economy and way of life.

At the 2015 Sustainable Development Summit, the 193 member states of the United Nations (UN) reached a consensus on the new agenda of major global challenges. The document “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, which sets 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets, must serve as an action plan for the international community and national governments to promote prosperity and common well-being over the coming years.

The SDGs focus on the three elements of sustainable development which interconnect to simultaneously form the axes of the Port's Third Strategic Plan, currently in force, and of this Annual Report: economic growth, social inclusion and environmental protection.

In recent years, policies aimed at adding value to our services, as well as environmental and social value - in line with the SDGs - have gained prominence within the Port Community. Indeed, one of the most outstanding projects in this regard is one that will allow us to achieve our goal of becoming a carbon-neutral port, an added value that our customers can include in their logistics chains to reduce their carbon footprint.

This project is none other than the Wharf Electrification Plan, with an investment of approximately €60 million, which will help us to more than halve greenhouse gas emissions from port activity by 2030. But that is not all. By electrifying the wharves, making it possible to connect ships arriving at the Port of Barcelona to mains current, we will achieve a 51% reduction in nitrogen oxide emissions and a 25% cut in particulates by 2030.

Fostering intermodality, a strategy that started a few years ago, is another aspect on which we are working to make port operations increasingly sustainable. Intermodality means fostering less polluting modes of transport, such as sea and rail, choosing the optimal solution for each shipment. The result of this policy launched by the Port of Barcelona was that in 2019 we were able to maintain the positive trend in goods transported by short sea shipping services, including the Motorways of the Sea, totalling over 410,000 intermodal transport units (ITU). We also maintained the proportion of rail transport, which was 13% for containers and 35.5% for vehicles. This strategy of fostering the intermodal approach has allowed us to reduce the emissions produced by port activity and to improve the surrounding air quality: in 2019 we were able to save 50,000 tonnes of CO₂.

In this regard, one of the most important events of 2019 in the Port of Barcelona involved strengthening our commitment to the Global Compact and the Sustainable Development Goals through a working meeting held in January, at which I was privileged to coincide with the president of the Spanish Network of the UN Global Compact, during which various ways were mooted to allow our Port to deepen the sustainable development of port activities and its surrounding area.

The Port of Barcelona is making a firm commitment to sustainability and will invest a great deal of its economic and human resources in the new decade to developing projects related to the current climate emergency. Europe has set out on a path to become the first climate-neutral continent in 2050, a Green Deal of which the Port of Barcelona very much wants to be a part.