As climate change affects severely the performance of IWT operation the priority is to create and test new solutions for both climate-neutral and climate-resilient IWT (Inland Waterways Transport). Even when the focus is on improving infrastructure resilience, a climate resilient IWT can only be realised by solutions addressing the IWT system. IWT system resilience is essentially co-dependent on infrastructure and barge/fleet reliability, maintainability and fault-tolerance and embraces the sectors’ key priorities: sustainable infrastructure adjustments, environmental friendliness and competitiveness of vessel fleet, digitalization, integration of IWT in multimodal transport chains, and securing availability of skilled workers. Further, IWT resilience enhancement interventions must ensure that biodiversity is not adversely affected.

The increasing level of dynamicity, heterogeneity, and complexity of IWT systems adds to the system’s climate change vulnerabilities and challenges its ability to react to severe predictable events and particularly to unexpected events. Inland ports located along inland waterways constitute efficient distribution hubs regulating various freight flows to cities, linked to global transport via seaport gateways making resilience of IW ports particularly important.

Digitalisation of the Transport sector is seen by the European Commission as a primary enabler of smart solutions for sustainable transport that can support resilience solutions and deliver economic, environmental, and societal benefits.

In the future, DTs can revolutionise the workings of the entire waterborne transport, from preliminary ship design right through to decommissioning across all the industries serving a ship’s lifecycle. Importantly, DTs can provide a decision support system for the industry to achieve resilience and decarbonisation based on cross-domain modelling standards and innovative architectures. As autonomous systems improve, their role will likely increase to support, highly resilient interconnected networks of manned, unmanned, automated, and autonomous systems on water, in air and on land.

However, progress in the adoption of innovation by the IWT sector, and achieving the associated resilience and decarbonisation goals, will not be constrained by technology limitations, but rather by systemic challenges affecting the European IWT digital and energy transition. Historically, the waterborne sector has exhibited a passive and conservative posture towards innovation, as well as a reluctance to digitalize “best practices”. In IWT this is principally owed to conservative “ways of operating” by barge skippers/owners, resulting in highly aging, inefficient fleet with unreliable and polluting operations.

To address these challenges, it is necessary to incentivise innovations across the different dimensions outlined above and provide robust validation of how and where innovation can support the transition to a sustainable, resilient and high-efficiency IWT system.