Title: Tourism4SDG
Total project budget: 1 730 702 EUR
Budget of the Ministry of the Economics: 191 153 EUR
Project period: 01.04.2024 - 30.06.2028
Programme: Interreg Europe
Partner countries: Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Netherlands, France, Estonia
Lead partner: Coimbra Region Intermunicipal Community (Portugal)
Project partners:
- Ministry of the Economy (Latvia)
- AIMRD (Spain)
- Lubelskie Voivodeship (Poland)
- Participant Nyíregyháza Municipality (Hungary)
- Tourist Board South Limburg/Visit Zuid-Limburg (Netherlands)
- Communauté d'Agglomération de La Rochelle (France)
- Tartu County Tourism Foundation (Estonia)
Tourism4SDG – a project co-financed by the European Union in the framework of the Interreg Europe Programme 2021-2027 – is set to ensure that sustainable tourism is achieved by focusing on the improvement of tourism policy instruments (PI) in the scope of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the United Nations.
Policy instruments are still not able to fully align with the SDG at all levels of tourism governance, and sustainable tourism initiatives are not being measured in terms of sustainability results. A self-assessment and reflection are much needed to facilitate the identification of limitations of the current tourism policy instruments to identify lines of action for the future. The question is no longer “how to make tourism (more) sustainable?” but instead “to what extent is tourism in fact becoming more sustainable?”.
The project promotes a 4-year interregional learning process aiming at enhancing the efficacy of tourism policy instruments, answering to the challenge proposed by SDG 12.b: “to develop and implement tools to monitor sustainable development impacts for sustainable tourism”. Tourism4SDG will be focused on supporting the partners’ PI in achieving sustainability by improving their capacity to measure tourism sustainability, via the integration of monitoring methodologies, tools, and specific indicators. Through this collaborative learning process, the project seeks to ensure that strategic decisions regarding sustainable tourism are informed by valuable information and data, thereby fostering successful outcomes in sustainability for participating regions.
Additionally, through the territorial transnational cooperation, with a partnership covering 8 different EU countries that act on different governance levels (local, regional and national), it will also enable the production of comparable data for monitoring the sustainability of tourism.
Website: www.interregeurope.eu/tourism4sdg