Strategic foresight to identify the drivers for the future of European port competitiveness

Executive summary

The European port system is entering a period in which competitiveness can no longer be assumed from geography or historical traffic alone. Disruptions such as the Red Sea crisis, the
escalation around the Strait of Hormuz, North European port congestion and the restructuring of major shipping alliances make clear how exposed the system is to forces beyond any single port’s control. This study, developed by Zaragoza Logistics Center (ZLC) in collaboration with F&L, applies Cross-Impact Balance (CIB) analysis to identify the structural conditions that will determine European port competitiveness through to 2040. Rather than predicting a single future, the methodology maps the space of internally consistent scenarios and the relationships that make them plausible, drawing on workshops with port authorities, logistics providers, terminal operators, and shipping lines.

The analysis produced 16 internally consistent scenarios across 3 stakeholder groups.

Three findings stand out.

First, infrastructure capacity and hinterland connectivity form the structural core of port competitiveness across every plausible future: no scenario achieves a coherent competitive configuration without both at their highest-quality states, regardless of governance conditions.

Second, maritime network position, whether a port operates as a global or regional hub, is the most contestable dimension of the system. It depends on commercial decisions by shipping lines that structural investment can support but not determine, meaning hub status must be continuously earned rather than assumed as a permanent attribute.

Third, and most significantly for the design of this study, port authorities and logistics providers do not perceive the same competitive system. Port authorities generate the widest scenario space, including 3 configurations of peripheral structural decline that appear nowhere else in the analysis. Logistics providers generate the narrowest, confined entirely to top-tier competitive conditions. This divergence is not a limitation of the method; it is one of the study’s most important findings, revealing a systematic blind spot in consultation processes that rely primarily on commercial stakeholders.

The scenarios also show that governance acts as a multiplier of structural investment rather than an independent source of advantage. Bloc-based governance, the configuration most consistent with current geopolitical trends, produces the strongest structural anchoring across all three stakeholder groups, suggesting that the present window, while EU frameworks such as the Connecting Europe Facility, the TEN-T core network, and the EU Emissions Trading System remain coordinated, is the period of maximum institutional support for the infrastructure and hinterland investments that will shape competitive positions through 2040. Ports that complete these investments now are positioned to sustain competitiveness even under future governance fragmentation; those that defer risk entering the next decade from configurations of constrained regional viability or structural lock-in, a trajectory the analysis shows do not require sudden collapse, only sustained inaction.

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Diana Isabel Alarcon Bohada
Zaragoza Logistics Center
1 July 2026