CarbonTour Campaign on Sustainable Tourism Samos Hotel 9 May 2012, 6.00 p.m. See more…

Area of implementation: North Aegean,Greece and Cyprus

Duration: September 1, 2010 – December 31, 2012

Budget: 1.324.139,00 € (50% EC funding)

The project objective is to develop a strategic approach for CO₂ offsetting and carbon neutrality for the tourist accommodation industry which will provide guidelines for the reduction of tourism contribution to climate change but at the same time will deliver cost savings if properly implemented, through reduced energy and water consumption, reduced gate fees for landfilling as well as through carbon credits.

In the framework of this project, the potential facilities and services of the accommodation units which are considered as CO₂ equivalent emission sources will be recorded through on site investigation on two tourist accommodations in North Aegean, Greece and Cyprus (associated beneficiaries of the project). For this purpose, a robust carbon footprint model will be developed which will evaluate the CO₂ equivalent emissions generated from the operation and maintenance of accommodation facilities such as (i) energy consuming activities, (ii) waste management practices, (iii) water and wastewater management practices. The model will be applied firstly to the two tourist accommodations in order to be optimized and afterwards a large scale demonstration will be implemented in 80 tourist accommodations in North Aegean and Cyprus.

Following, the results will be evaluated and the participating tourist accommodations will be ranked according to their carbon footprint and the contribution of each CO₂ emitter activity to the overall carbon footprint for the participating tourist accommodations will be estimated.

Specified CO₂ offsetting targets will be set along with an effective set of options. These targets will represent percentages of carbon footprint offset for each accommodation facility while the developed carbon footprint software will be used for quantifying and evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed scenarios in order to assess the overall CO₂ equivalent emission reduction resulting from the measures set. In order to investigate the viability of the proposed scenarios and the potentials of their implementation a techno-economical analysis will also take place in which the most favourable scenarios, in terms of sustainability, will prevail. Finally a thorough investigation will performed to estimate the emission reduction potential resulting from the overall mitigation strategy plan for the Region of North Aegean and for Cyprus.