On July 14, NECSTouR joined the Tourism Declares community by recognising the urgent need to address climate change as we are to ensure the long-term survival of our industry and the many benefits it brings for businesses, visitors and communities.

Thus, NECSTouR declares the climate emergency as the EU approves the “Fit for 55 package under the European Green Deal” to align our ambition for Europe to become the first climate neutral destination.

This is a natural and key step in our journey towards sustainability and we commit in making tourism a driver of action and solution. We are proud to join the Tourism Declares partners, count on their expertise and commit to offer the regional perspective which we translate into action. By declaring we will keep working with our members which wish to go one step further in their commitment to sustainable tourism development. For this, at NECSTouR we are developing a Climate Action Plan, which will enable us to support EU’s Green Deal principles and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for Better Places to Live and Visit” says Patrick Torrent, NECSTouR President.

We are knowledgeable of tourism as a driver for Sustainable Development Goals and the twin transition of destinations “greening-digital” at the core of the Green Deal strategies and now we wish to scale this work up to the global climate action context. Therefore, we will keep undertaking actions to build a sustainable tourism destinations model and boost greening-digital transition to become more competitive destinations and we will gather them into an overall NECSTouR Climate Action Plan.

Having Necstour and its network of frontunning destinations across Europe join Tourism Declares is a very significant moment for our initiative's development," says Jeremy Smith, Tourism Declares' co-founder. "I am looking forward to working with them to develop our destination work across the continent in the coming months, so that together we ensure collaborative climate action is at the heart of our continent's tourism recovery".

We invite our members and partners to support our commitment by sharing expertise on how to immediately associate sustainability to the recovery of the European tourism sector.