Article
On 21 May 2026, from 15:15 to 16:30, CINEA hosted the corporate workshop “Sustainable Tourism as a Driver for Resilient Coastal Communities” at European Maritime Day in Limassol. The session showcased solutions and challenges identified by EU-funded projects working to transform coastal tourism into sustainable, nature-positive and community-led development pathways.
The framing was straightforward: coastal and maritime tourism dominates the EU Blue Economy, generating the largest share of gross value added (32.7%) and employment (53.1%). The workshop brought together experiences from the LIFE and EMFAF programmes, together with local EMFAF Shared Management experience in Cyprus.
CoastalPro was invited as a panellist and represented by project coordinator Odysseas Spyroglou, who presented the skills and capacity-building dimension. His contribution showed how targeted training addresses capacity gaps linked to environmental sustainability, digitalisation and changing tourism models, equipping professionals, local stakeholders and future workers to deliver sustainable coastal tourism — underlining that investing in people is a critical enabler of resilient coastal communities.
The panel covered three complementary dimensions: turning conservation into opportunity, with LIFE PROMETHEUS; skills and capacity building, with CoastalPro; and action on the ground, with the community-led “Dive In Our Islands” diving network in Cyprus and Greece, supported through EMFAF Shared Management via Fisheries LAGs.
Each project presented in seven minutes with two slides and shared its data by link and QR code, followed by a moderated discussion with project coordinators and maritime stakeholders and an interactive exchange on replicability, scalability and community impact — with the explicit aim of inspiring replication across EU sea basins.
