The regional Minitry of Tourism, Regeration, Justice and Local Administration of Andalusia is partner of two projects focused on the Sustainable Development of Mediterranean Destinations: DestiMED Plus and BestMED.

DestiMED PLUS

This project is the next step on a journey to evolve the Mediterranean into an internationally recognized ecotourism destination, where regions support protected areas through improved planning, policies, and promotion strategies that link

tourism with conservation. The project builds on the success of MEET and DestiMED projects, which supported Med protected areas to leverage ecotourism for sustainable development and conservation. DestiMED PLUS upscales its vision toward regions, strengthening the enabling environment that ecotourism needs to thrive in the Med. The project ́s game-changing approach establishes a consortium of regional administrations representing conservation and tourism, which

will work together to make protected area tourism more sustainable. This new platform will allow them to exchange ideas, strengthen policies, and develop an integrated ecotourism model which will be adopted by their territories.

The project will capitalize on DestiMED ́s monitoring tools by developing an innovative methodology to evaluate ecotourism ́s socio-economic impacts, with an eye toward measuring the Sustainable Net Impact of ecotourism products, ensuring they provide positive overall value to communities in and around protected areas on islands and in sparsely populated areas. An online capacity building tool will also be produced to improve competencies of SMEs in key areas, while strengthening the management capacities of local and regional authorities.

BEST MED

This project contributes to the objective of enhancing MED Governance, being the main challenges seasonality and lack of effective cooperation among main tourism actors, including the citizen active participation on the policies design Partnership of 10 regions and 11 partners, commitmment of 11 associated partners is involved in this Project that contributes to support evidence-based planning, monitoring and evaluation of interventions in MED programme, by getting a joint approach on “green” planning based on and improving the outputs gained by other projects such as Tourism Data indicators toolkit and Green Beach Model (MITOMED+), and Tourism sustainability toolkit in Mediterranean (CO-EVOLVE) on a widen model for routes linking coastal and maritime and inland destinations, as well as other projects outputs.

It aims to have a new integrated and sustainable touristic planning aiming at the mitigation of seasonality in the MED area, through the connection between coastal regions to inland regions, such as a path-route method.

A testing phase will obtain a joint model that will be transfered and capitalised as well as the toolkit and DATA indicators updated We propose to analyse positive and negative impacts of tourism on the quality of life of tourists, residents and about the quality of the tourist's experience, proposed in the Faro Convention AP 2019 COE

A MoU and Granada Charter on Sustainable Tourism will be signed for transferability and sustainability of outputs.