The MED (Mediterranean) Sustainable Tourism Community, representing around 100 organisations linked to tourism and sustainability, gathered in Rome to promote Community4Tourism, an initiative funded by the Interreg Euro-MED programme with the leadership of the Barcelona Provincial Council.
Partners include Terrassa City Council and the Catalan Industrial Tourism Network (XATIC), together with many other stakeholders such as universities, regions and other organisations.
The MED Sustainable Tourism Community offered an opportunity to present a dozen initiatives linked to sustainable tourism that will receive a €10 million grant from the ERDF Fund.
The projects focus on innovation, the circular economy, climate change and preserving nature and biodiversity.
The meeting in Rome was also a chance to present the Join the Med programme, which seeks to share practices of interest to the sector.
Barcelona’s leadership
Initiatives to promote sustainable tourism in the Mediterranean region will continue to be led by the Barcelona Provincial Council until 2029, and will continue to include members from various Mediterranean countries such as the University of Thessaly (Greece), the Adriatic Ionian Euroregion (Croatia), the Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions (France), the NECSTouR network (Belgium), the Mediterranean Universities Union (Italy), Plan Bleu (France) and the University of Tirana (Albania).
The MED Sustainable Tourism Community has a budget of €5 million for the seven years it will operate. Of this amount, the Barcelona Provincial Council directly manages €843,000 to continue the Interreg MED 2014-2020 programme, led by the same organisation.
Community4Tourism has two main lines of action: promoting the Join the Med platform, as a knowledge and training hub that will collect resources of interest for the tourism sector; and creating four thematic clusters having to do with the programme’s four specific goals (innovation, the circular economy, climate change and protecting biodiversity) as spaces for interaction among Mediterranean projects, institutions and stakeholders.
