At the Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC) 2025, David Garcia Sanchez from TECNALIA, partner in the CLARION Project, contributed to the high-level panel “Navigating Market Uncertainties in Global Port Operations.” The session, brought together senior representatives from the Ports of Barcelona, Los Angeles, Busan and Gothenburg.
David highlighted the increasingly complex environment ports must navigate, defined by climate-related vulnerabilities, geopolitical uncertainty, cascading systemic risks and regulatory ambiguity. These pressures demand new, more adaptive and data-driven approaches.
He underlined the essential role of CLARION in strengthening ports’ capacity to handle disruptions through:
- Advanced predictive models and digital twins, enabling ports to simulate future scenarios and improve infrastructure preparedness.
- Real-time monitoring and AI-driven decision support, allowing operators to anticipate, absorb and recover from shocks more efficiently.
- Resilience-based frameworks that help ports balance standardisation with flexible, modular infrastructure—especially where physical expansion is constrained.
- Strategic investment planning rooted in risk-adjusted, long-term resilience analysis to ensure today’s decisions remain sound in an uncertain future.
David stressed the need for an agnostic, holistic digital strategy backed by a shared taxonomy across all transport modes, a central ambition of CLARION project.
CLARION continues to collaborate with European ports, research centres, and technology partners to build a more resilient, adaptive and sustainable maritime logistics ecosystem.
