EcoVeloTour

Project: Fostering enhanced ecotourism planning along the Eurovelo cycle route network in the Danube region

Acronym: DTP2-055-2.2 – EcoVeloTour

The project is supported by The Danube Transnational Programme and the European Union.

Summary: EcoVeloTour facilitates the development of sustainable tourism in the Danube region along EuroVelo routes via enhanced, conscious and ecologically sound framework of tourism destination management and extending cyclist tourism, unfolding neighbouring regions beyond the EuroVelo route. The regions will capitalize on cultural and natural heritage, through the integration of the ecosystem service framework into ecotourism planning, that enable the attentive maintenance of high ecosystem provisions that contribute to the well-being of the region including ecotourism stakeholders in the long run. The framework will be strongly support by sustainable mobility guidelines, that is key element in comprehensive ecotourism planning, esp. in the case of cyclist ecotourism. Moreover, a comprehensive market research will help Danube region wide to assess better the potentials and ways forward in the ecotourism development.

Regional ecotourism strategies will be elaborated based on the developed framework and good practices, studies on ecotourism, green mobility, knowledge exchange, potential ecosystem service mapping of pilot areas, intensive key actors’ cooperation, stakeholder analysis and participation, learning interactions (including e-learning) at regional and transnational level. The implementation of the strategies starts during the project lifetime including small-scale investments too. The bottom-up approach, collected experience from local level will result in a policy recommendation to ensure the capitalization of project results at policy-maker level.

Outputs will be: (i) transnational tools for ecotourism development and management: enhanced framework for ecotourism development and mobility planning guidelines, transnational market research, policy recommendation, ecotourism mobile app., e-learning platform; (ii) pilot regional ecotourism strategies; (iii) transnational learning interactions.