Meeting Summary: 5th Experts' meeting towards SRIA for the Black Sea, Burgas 30.5/ Next steps

It was an excellent opportunity that the Burgas Vision Paper was launched during the European Maritime Day, which was organised for the first time in a Black Sea country. It is also very relevant that the Ministerial Declaration towards a Common Maritime Agenda for the Black Sea, signed in Burgas, mentions and emphasises your work as a key priority.

As we agreed in Burgas, this is only a milestone towards developing a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) for the Black Sea basin. I would like to remind you the next milestones that we agreed together during our last meeting in Burgas:

• The next meeting of the group will take place in Bucharest on 5 October 2018. For the moment, please save the date, you will receive more details about this meeting in due time;
• We intend to organise another meeting until the end of the year, most probably in Brussels;
• Depending on the dynamics of the group and the progress made, we may be able to support another meeting at the beginning of 2019;
• The upcoming Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU committed to host a Presidency event in Bucharest in May 2019, where the SRIA will be launched.

We will, of course, continue to work together in between these meetings. Based on the text of the Burgas Vision Paper, we invite each of you to consult your national Black Sea stakeholders as broadly as possible, to make sure that the final product of our work truly reflects your needs. We will work together with the METU team to propose some guidelines for the consultation within your national networks and communities.

Please find attached, for your records, the Ministerial Declaration and the Burgas Vision Paper.

burgas-ministerial-declaration_en.pdf

burgas-vision-paper_en.pdf

On behalf of the DG RTD and DG MARE Teams

Sigi Gruber

Head of Unit

F4 – Marine Resources

DG Research & Innovation