The ECHO-Tourism project is inspired by the functioning of energy sobriety awareness-raising schemes that it aims to change scale and reinvent. Its name comes from a desire to propagate practices of sobriety to limit the ecological footprint related to the tourist activity by allowing flexible swarming in 4 countries of an adaptable and reproducible model that can reverberate by dissemination and multiplication. This project is conducted in a transnational way, because it comes in response to common challenges for the European Union in terms of energy and environmental policies, citizen engagement, equality for access to training and preservation of resources on the territories. Coordinated by a French cooperative society specialized in energy and sustainable development called the 7 Vents, the project is supported by a partnership made up of multi-faceted and complementary actors in their areas of expertise, including the Greeks of MCE, the Italians of CESIE, Croats from UDRAGA BRAC, Belgians from CESEP and French from INISEO. The implementation of the project-developed instrument enables the training of professionals in the tourism sector to pass on their eco-friendly practices to their customers on the topics of energy, waste management, mobility, preservation of vernacular fauna and flora. Through experimentation and the cross-cutting nature of knowledge transfer, it promotes, through the interest it arouses, an informal increase in skills of participants who wish to promote the use of these practices. The added value of the model stems from its commitment to promoting an offer of content and transmission tools that are intelligible, flexible and adapted to the needs of the population while promoting equal opportunities for access to training. Overall, the ECHO project aims to ensure that more and more tourism stakeholders are able to appropriate the training offer and the related awareness-raising mechanism by production of 3 intellectual productions, organization of 3 trainings and 5 multiplier events. In concrete terms, the results and impact sought are at the same time: - An increase in the global competence of the actors wishing to engage in the promotion of this type of approach in terms of methodological, technical and contextual analysis; - The spin-off of the device to reduce disparities in access to training in the territories; - The good co-ordination of the project and the effectiveness of the dissemination actions: the objective is to allow to answer to the stakes of quality but also of durability of the actions after the period of ERASMUS + financing.
The general objective of ECHO-Tourism is to reduce the ecological impact of tourism in an entertaining and engaging way. The resulting sub-objectives are: • that tourism professionals and tourists apply eco-gestures in their daily life • that learning takes place through interaction and constructive exchanges between professionals and tourists • that tourists bring back home their new “awareness and green behaviour”. By raising awareness on behaviour change and by involving multiple territories across Europe, ECHO-TOURISM sparkles the initiation of a new way of enjoying the treasures that our planet can offer, and more importantly, brings it to the next level and spread it across many territories through a comprehensive and playful training program. Completing this program brings new skills to tourism professionals as well as shapes a new dynamic, bringing the opportunity to start new activities, and to enhance their attractivity to the public. This objective is reinforced by the fact that eco-friendly behaviour decreases the energetic bills which allow more funds to be invested in new developments.
The impact of tourism on the environment is significant and its impacts are visible : from the massive overbuilding of the banks, the overconsumption of natural and energy resources, to the overproduction of waste and GHG emissions, the list seems endless. However, and as in many matters, this situation is not inevitable: there are many avenues for improvement, including eco-friendly actions, applicable to tourism. Responsible tourism approaches are developing in the territories to meet growing demand from tourists. The opening of markets and the attraction provided by these development prospects on sufficiency should make it possible to finance the system at the end of the three years of completion of the project, which is currently the case in France for sobriety actions in other sectors. of activity (particularly in the business world). This project co-funded by the European Commission as part of the Erasmus + program, has above all an educational scope, as the key of these three years of collaborative work is the creation of a training platform for those who wish to deepen their knowledge in ecological practices : from tourism professionals to the tourists themselves.