Workshop 17 "From Isolation to Innovation: Boosting Maritime and Coastal Tourism in Outermost Regions"

Workshop Objective

The workshop focuses on presenting challenges and opportunities for new innovative marine-based ecotourism products and practices in the EU Outermost Regions (ORs).

The objectives of the workshop are to:

• Highlight opportunities: Showcase the unique features of ORs that support sustainable maritime and coastal tourism innovation.

• Identify challenges: Discuss constraints like environmental risks, accessibility, and infrastructure.

• Foster collaboration: Bring together stakeholders from local governments, the tourism industry, academia, and the community.

• Develop actionable solutions: Create strategies for sustainable development and economic growth. From the workshop, actionable recommendations are expected to emerge, as a way to help to feed the policy feedback reports of the TWINNEDbySTARS and ecoRoute projects.

Key components of the workshop entail:

· A keynote speech (from the European Commission), reflecting on the economic potential and sustainability of maritime and coastal tourism in ORs.

· Presentation of exemplary initiatives and projects including the EU-funded projects TWINNEDbySTARS and ecoRoute and the international Blue Flag certification.

· A panel discussion session to discuss how to:

1. unlock the potential of ecotourism of maritime and coastal tourism in ORs, including astro tourism, natural heritage, and cultural uniqueness; and

2. overcome challenges for sustainable growth (e.g, twin transition, climate change impacts, workforce skills).

· Q&A session to gather feedback from participants so it can be fed back to the TWINNEDbySTARS and ecoRoute project, and benefit the Outermost Regions communities.