MinLand Final Conference and Clustering Event

On Friday, 22^nd November 2019, the Horizon 2020 funded project MinLand held its Final Conference and Clustering Event in Brussels, Belgium. Members of the Consortium and the Advisory Group and relevant stakeholders from the Commission, the Member States and the Industry met before the very end of the project to share the project results and outcomes and discuss the progress and the achievements made by MinLand.

The Final Conference started with a keynote speech by the EU Project Coordinator, Nikolaos Arvanitidis and a short introduction of the project by the MinLand Coordinator, Ronald Arvidsson, both from the Geological Survey of Sweden (SGU). They welcomed all the attendees to the conference and gave a general overview of the 2-year MinLand project, including its aims, objectives and work structure. The attendees at the final conference comprised of experts from the policy field at various authorisation level, industry, SME’s, experts and relevant stakeholders.

The second session of the event addressed the MinLand methodology and deliverables and explored the steering and implementation capacity on framework conditions provided by clustering various projects addressing mineral-related policies.

Theo van der Sluis Wageningen Environmental Research presented an update on “Mineral Land-use challenging Societal and Environmental Issues”, followed by an overview of the “Land-use planning and mineral-based industrial value chains” by Irina Sokolova representing the Agency for International Minerals Policy (MinPol).

Ronald Arvidsson and Nikolaos Arvanitidis (SGU) presented MinLand’s approach on “Good Practice Elements, Guidelines and Recommendations for mineral land-use”. When it comes to clustering with other projects, Manuel María Regueiro González-Barros from the Geological Survey of Spain (IGME) showcased the “The Intermin project promoting international networking on Raw Materials”, while Kaisa Turunen from the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK) gave a speech about the “MIREU project and land-use”.Shortly afterwards, Nike Luodes from GTK gave an overview of the “The MineFacts project challenging Social License to Operate aspects”and Edine Bakker (SGU) presented “The X-Mine project and stakeholder interaction”. The session ended with Chrysanthi Panagiotopoulou from National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), who presented the “Minland Project and interaction with stakeholders through workshops”, highlighting the networking achievements the project made in terms of potential stakeholders and the steps forward.

The Plenary and closing session of the Final Conference, was open to discussions along with the of Minland conclusions presented by Gerry Stanley   , member of the MinLand Advisory Group. Additionally, Marcin Sadowski, Head of Sector of the Raw Materials Department at the Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (EASME) – European Commission, gave a full and-comprehensive closing speech addressing Minland, but also  “Raw Materials within the scope of H2020 and Horizon Europe”.

Download the pdf version of the news article.

The pictures of the conference are available here.

Have a look at the video of the MinLand Final Conference Opening speech here.