greentourism.ro

The 7th Meeting of the Carpathian Convention Working Group on Sustainable Tourism took place on 18 – 20 May 2015, in Aggtelek National Park, Hungary.

Greentourism Ecological Association, represented by Mr. Constantin Serban, the president of the association and the founder of greentourism concept in Romania contributed as observer together with representatives of several NGOs like ETE, CEEWEB, European Wilderness Society and ARD Zakarpattya and representatives of the seven Carpathian countries.

The main goal of the meeting was the review of progress on first year implementation of the Protocol on Sustainable Tourism and of the Strategy for Sustainable Tourism Development of the Carpathians.

The discussion focused on establishing an online Carpathian platform to facilitate networking among interested stakeholders, to exchange information and best practices, to share common mechanisms and resources to support the implementation of the Protocol and the Strategy on Sustainable Tourism.

Mr. Constantin Serban underlined the need to respect sustainable criteria in developing the Carpathian platform and in the same time to promote only sustainable tourism products. He also proposed that Carpathia logo to use mostly the green color letters on white background in order to emphasize the idea of sustenability.

The second day mainly focussed on project opportunities and initiatives and possible funding sources. Mr. Serban presented the Wallchian Vatra Trail project – holiday villages network, for getting feedback and atracting potential partners as a first step.

In the idea of sharing information and good or bad practices on the website and related with financial challanges, he gave the example of a situation in Romania with impact on the sustainable tourism strategy implementation. As members in the Workshop Group for Rural economic development of Agriculture and Rural Development Ministry, Greentourism Association stressed the need  to include the Carpathian Sustainable tourism Strategy in the legislation framework in the new national rural development plan for 2014-2020 in Romania, and also the need of financing all rural tourism activities not only agri-tourism among other aspects, but none of these were adopted.

The question was if other countries faced the same difficulties in including CC Sustainable tourism strategy in the legal framework of the new financing programmes.

All meeting presentations including Wallachian Vatra Trail are available on Carpathian Convention official site here: http://www.carpathianconvention.org/eventdetailwg-tourism/events/seventh-meeting-of-the-working-group-on-sustainable-tourism.html

You can see another article regarding this meeting here:

http://wilderness-society.org/carpathian-convention-sustainable-tourism-workshop/