It is the key objective of the project CRISTAL (40 months) to increase the share of freight transport on inland water transport (IWT) by a minimum of 20% and to demonstrate on its three pilot sites (Italy, Poland and France) strategies to improve reliability by 80%. CRISTAL project will assure IWT capacity at 50% even during extreme weather events. Towards that CRISTAL will co-create, test and implement integrated, cooperative and innovative solutions in its three pilot partners’ areas identified in Italy, France and Poland. The project will include the aspects of technological innovation/development and digitalization; further advancement towards the Physical Internet, governance solution and business models, will be proposed while targeting sustainability and infrastructure resilience requirements.

Due to globalized supply chains and the prevalence of just-in-time production, all economies of the industrialized world are reliant on the flawless operation of the logistical network. During the Cov19 pandemic it became apparent that this network can be massively shattered and that a better understanding of its robustness, risks and vulnerabilities is of vital importance. Additionally, it is obvious that the accelerating climate change demands a much greener fright transport. SARIL aims to complement the classic definition of resilience, which focuses on threat prevention, robustness and system recovery, by green aspects. Key performance indicators will be defined which quantify both, the system resistance against disruptions as well as the environmental burden of freight transport. Adopting three different scenarios on different geographical scales (regional, national and international/EU), models will be developed which are able to capture the unperturbed system operation as well as the behavior in case of a disruptions. While the regional (Italy) and national (Spain/Portugal) scenarios focus on natural hazards which become more threatening due to climate change, the international scenario (Northern/Central Europe) considers the disruptions due to pandemics (like Cov19) or wars (like the Russian war against Ukraine). Although the three scenarios will be modelled with varying levels of detail, SARIL aims at a universal understanding of green resilience by using a common framework. The results for the three scenarios will be used to assess similarities and differences between the three geographical scales. By exploiting the findings, recommendations to improve the classic resilience, like e.g., synchro-modal approaches, will be derived. Additionally, SARIL aims for recommendations to reach . The results will be widely disseminated to the scientific community and relevant stakeholders.