Theodora Papatheochari (p), Spyros Niavis, Antonia Koutsopoulou, Pelagia Moloni, Harry Coccossis

Lu'u Dauxais

Ensuring a sustainable path for tourism requires the mobilization of both private and public actors, along with improvements in policy frameworks at both strategic and operational levels. The Interreg initiative provides fertile ground for fostering collaboration among diverse stakeholders and driving significant progress toward sustainable tourism development. This calls for the active participation of stakeholders and project partners after the project’s lifetime and the continuous monitoring of similar projects in order to build on available knowledge, bring added value, and avoid replication. To deal with these challenges, the capitalization of past knowledge and the viability of project results after their implementation are now essential criteria used by Managing Authorities to evaluate project applications. Moreover, programmes set new mechanisms, such as governance and community projects, targeted capitalization calls, formal partner agreements after the implementation of projects, and digital platforms to maintain results. This paper seeks to highlight the importance of a knowledge hub collecting data and information related to such a diverse topic, such as sustainable tourism. In order to do so, the paper showcases the experience gained through the creation of Join the Med platform, a knowledge hub developed by Community4Tourism (C4T), the Thematic Community project of the Interreg Euro-MED Programme for Enhancing Sustainable Tourism under the Sustainable Tourism Mission of Interreg Euro-MED Programme. Join the Med platform answers to the need for effectively and efficiently collecting and presenting the results of projects, which are considered relevant to sustainable tourism issues as well as valuable assets for practitioners, policy makers, academics and other stakeholders’ groups, in an integrated and dynamic way in order to reach the end-users and ensure the viability and replicability of the results. The platform functions as a knowledge hub for sustainable tourism issues by drawing information from the actions and results of the Sustainable Tourism Mission and as a mechanism for visual presentation of the synthesis of the Community’s results. The aim is to establish a non-static, dynamic tool with interactive visualizations of the projects’ results which can also act as a database and monitoring mechanism collecting projects’ results and incorporating visual features by mapping pilot areas, actors, activities, synergies and links with other projects and activities. Join the Med architecture includes five basic features, namely, tangible and replicable tools, a fully customizable search engine, a collection of best practices, a mapping of relevant stakeholders and a series of policy hubs.

Lu'u Dauxais (p)

Andrea Omizzolo

Summer 2022: Lisbon 43°C - Athens 45°C - Syracuse 48°C... Experts agree that summer 2022 offers us a foretaste of the future Mediterranean climate: a climate with more extreme conditions and where heat waves are set to increase. Under these conditions, how can we imagine, conceive and realize public spaces adapted to the reality and the projections of climate changes?
Thanks to the Cool Noons project, five pilot cities (Marseille, Lisbon, Imola, Budva and Dubrovnik) will be developing and testing solutions to improve thermal comfort for residents and tourists while at the same time redesigning urban spaces with the goal of better adapting to climate challenges.
As climate change adaptations and challenges concern all of us, how do we ensure the consideration of all? What kind of tools to measure and integrate inhabitants’ points of view?

Since the challenges of climate change are complex, responses, far from being simple and one-size-fits-all - the “monoculture of thought” - must be exploratory, collective and creative.The presentation wants to address the results of the Cool Noons project and reflect on perspectives for the building of the culture of ecological transition and sustainable tourism: “involving the citizen, from the vision to the end-use”, through tools like surveys, workshops and online picture competition. The ecological transition and sustainable tourism implies a cultural shift from all, as much as the culture and the tourism fields need to shift to the ecological transition.

Andrea Omizzolo (p), Philipp Corradini, Agnese Moroni

Theodora Papatheochari

In the Alps, a project co-funded by the European Union through the Interreg Alpine Space Programme called ‘BeyondSnow’ succeeded in getting 10 pilot areas (PWAs) to work on the hot topic of the lack of snow during the winter due to climate change (CC) and its social and economic implications for winter tourism destinations at medium and low altitudes and their communities.
Based on the theoretical and practical findings and experiences gained within the PWAs, BeyondSnow elaborated specific and concrete CC adaptation- and resilience-oriented policy guidelines for mountain alpine tourism snow destinations, targeting tourism actors, local and regional public authorities and decision-makers such as e.g., Destinations Management Organisations (DMOs) and regional development agencies.
The authors aim at presenting these policy guidelines, one of the main results of the BeyondSnow project, believing that what emerged from the project may stimulate further research steps and serve as blueprints for the initiation and continuation of transition processes in other winter destinations and mountain communities of the Mediterranean region for decreasing the snow-dependency of their respective tourism system, strengthening their resilience regarding CC-induced ecologic & socioeconomic effects.