Local communities, regional stakeholders and entrepreneurs working in sustainable tourism for the Carpathian regions of Visegrad countries have spurred UN Environment to help boost and potentially replicate successful initiatives.

The ‘Carpathian Tourism: Cooperation of V4 Countries’ project is financed by the Visegrad Fund and is being realised between February 2017 and February 2018. The project aims to strengthen local economies and communities through a cooperation platform between stakeholders and the local tourism sectors in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland.

Partners and experts will organise workshops for local tourism providers, thereby improving their skills to develop ecotourism products and services such as handcrafts or glassblowing.

Attracting more tourists to the region helps solve some of the main challenges faced by European rural mountain communities: economic stagnation, emigration, environmental degradation and loss of natural and cultural resources.

The project will help local stakeholders face these challenges and create a strategy for sustainable tourism development in the targeted regions. This is in line with the Carpathian Convention aims of pursuing comprehensive policies and cooperation to guarantee protection and sustainable development of the Carpathians.

The Convention’s Secretariat will therefore support this work by presenting the platform’s outcomes to its Sustainable Tourism Working Group and to the Convention’s Conference of the Parties in October 2017. This will ensure greater visibility and in turn enable the project to find partners for a follow-up initiative replicating this in the framework of the EU Strategy of the Danube Region.

For more information please write to harald.egerer@unvienna.org