Lloret Turisme took part in the second meeting of the consortium of the Greentour project “Circular Economy and Sustainable Tourism in Destinations in the SUDOE area” , a pilot project financed with European funds that creates alliances between consolidated tourist destinations for the implementation of environmental footprint assessment systems and the creation of an eco-label for tourist establishments in the SUDOE area (regions of southwest Europe). The meeting took place in the city of Guimarães (Portugal). The technical partners involved in the project participated in this second meeting: UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change (ESCI-UPF), the University of Cantabria, the University of Aveiro (Portugal) and the Technological Centre for Energy Efficiency and Sustainability Foundation EnergyLab (Vigo) as well as the partner destinations which are Lloret Turisme, Auvergne Rhône-Alpes Tourisme (FR), Deputación Pontevedra-Rías Baixas, Fundación Camino Lebaniego (Cantabria) and Laboratório de Paisagem Guimarães (Portugal).
During the meeting, among others, the results of the scientific study carried out by the PhD student Alessandra Moscatelli of the UNESCO Chair in “Environment, Resources and Sustainable Development” of the Parthenope University of Naples, Italy / UNESCO Chair in “Life Cycle and Climate Change” of ESCI-UPF, Barcelona, Spain, were presented. The PhD student presented an example of environmental impact assessment of a small town (municipality of Piaggine, Italy) comparing two methodologies. The first, based on the Urban metabolism-LCA, carried out with the Simapro software, and the second, using the Greentour tool. Jaume Albertí, coordinator of the explains that “The results of this comparison show that the Greentour tool is useful, not only at the level of the tourist establishment, but also to quickly identify the critical points of environmental impact at the municipal level”.
The study also presents a comparison between the environmental impact assessment of the hotel Samba in Lloret de Mar and the same small Italian town (municipality of Piaggine) and concludes that “when we compare large tourist establishments with small towns, the types of impact and their distribution are comparable”.
The Hotel Samba in Lloret de Mar was chosen from among all the accommodation establishments participating in the Greentour project because of its dimensional characteristics (number of guests, services, etc.) similar to the small town under investigation, and also because of the completeness of the set of data provided by the establishment in the Greentour tool. For Elizabeth Keegan, manager of Lloret Turisme, “the incorporation of external research studies such as this one conducted by UNESCO Chairs reaffirms the effectiveness of the Greentour tool as a platform for environmental impact assessment and is very positive for the project’s solidity”.
Other topics that were discussed during the meeting in Guimãres are the provisional results of the evaluation tool with the data uploaded by the different tourist establishments of the destinations that are part of the project; the presentation of various proposals of the project label has been made and the basis for the creation of a European network of stakeholders to promote the growth of the project and the study of tourism sustainability beyond the funding period of the GREENTOUR initiative has been laid.
