Greening the Islands Foundation
There’s a familiar rhythm to island travel. You arrive, you settle in, you visit the highlights, and you leave with a camera full of photos and a collection of souvenirs that rarely carry the weight of what you actually experienced, while still feeling like you’ve only scratched the surface. But what if the problem …
Transforming Island Travel: From Visits Toward Immersive Experiences Read More »
The EcoMedIslands project is a strategic territorial project under the Greener MED priority of the Interreg Euro-MED Programme. Its ambition is to reposition waste prevention at the top of the waste management hierarchy, enabling Mediterranean islands to transition toward more sustainable, resilient, and circular systems. Bringing together island pilots from Greece, Croatia, Italy, Cyprus, …
EcoMedIslands: Rethinking Waste Prevention in Mediterranean Islands Read More »
For decades, islands have been promoted as summer escapes for short stays, crowded beaches, and concentrated demand. Today, a new paradigm is emerging, one that encourages tourists to travel less but stay more, fostering deeper connections with local environments, cultures, and communities. Shaped by geographic isolation, limited resources, rich traditions, and fragile ecosystems, islands are …
By their nature, small islands are at the front line of climate change. Rising sea levels, increasing water scarcity, biodiversity loss and extreme heat intersect most acutely where land, sea and livelihoods are tightly interwoven. In the Mediterranean, one of the world’s most popular travel destinations, these pressures are even stronger because of tourism, which …
Island ecosystems—isolated, land-limited, and tourism-dependent—face significant waste management challenges, including inadequate infrastructure and environmentally harmful practices like dumping and burning. This study explores how circular economy (CE) principles—reduce, reuse, recycle—can transform waste into a resource and strengthen local resilience. A refined definition of “small islands” which incorporates both UN criteria and tourism intensity to capture …
Islands often sit at the heart of tourism’s tension with nature: fragile ecosystems, smallscale economies, high visitor dependency, and limited infrastructure magnify the challenge. When tourism becomes the dominant economic sector, islands are exposed to serious pressures such as resource depletion, cultural dilution, infrastructure overload, and ecological degradation. The key question is: what innovation, policy …
Transforming Island Tourism into Sustainable, Resilient, and Inclusive Models Read More »
Mediterranean islands face a unique set of waste management challenges: geographical isolation, limited land availability, sensitive ecosystems, and the high costs of transporting waste off-island. Seasonal surges in tourism add further strain, pushing infrastructure designed for small resident populations to the limit. With scarce space for landfills and heightened risks to natural habitats, effective waste …
EcoMedIslands: Advancing Prevention, Elevating Waste Management in Mediterranean Islands Read More »
Islands rely heavily on tourism, which often brings challenges like seasonality, overtourism, resource pressure and waste generation and management issues. Yet, a new wave of EU-funded projects is pioneering holistic, sustainable tourism models. ReBoat project is leading the transformation by incorporating nature-based pathways, stakeholder participatory design, circular economy models and innovative recycling mobile plant …
Reinventing Tourism on Islands: Sustainability Through Innovation Read More »
The Interreg Euro-MED Programme’s Sustainable Tourism Mission has released a White Paper on Tourism and Climate Adaptation about the Euro-Mediterranean, developed within the framework of the Dialogue4Tourism Project. Along with the Community4Tourism Project, the document provides a deep, narrative style analysis about the connection between tourism and climate adaptation detailing the problems, approaches and solutions …
A cooperation to promote sustainable tourism in the Mediterranean can play an important role in the socio-economic development of the region, while mitigating the negative effects of the climate change. This is the driver of the Interreg Euro-MED Programme Dialogue4Tourism (D4T) that proposes different tools for the monitoring and a better governance of the sector. …
