Castwater project
The Castwater project (Coastal Areas Sustainable Tourism Water Management in the Mediterranean) studies how to promote and enhance sustainable tourism in Mediterranean coastal areas with special attention to reducing the impact on water resources.
Visit Valéncia, Las Naves and València City Council work together in a consortium formed by other European cities and water entities to study socioeconomic indicators and test and evaluate an online tool on water management by tourism companies and public administrations.
The Castwater project is part of the Interreg Med program, has European funding and, among other actions, obtains sustainability indicators and evaluation criteria that can measure the impact of the tourism sector on water management. In addition, it develops, implements and validates an online tool that allows the monitoring and self-assessment of water management by both tourism companies and public institutions. The project also coincides in 2017 with the International Year of Sustainable Tourism, declared by the UN.
One of the objectives of Castwater is that these public administrations can be trained at a local and regional level on the sustainable management of water, as well as guiding them to work on Sustainable Tourism Action Plans that integrate policies and measures in this regard.
The project also has a challenge of city and is located in the study of the specific case of València. Tourism in our city is one of the economic drivers and this increases progressively, therefore, we must take into account the increase in demand for water resources. Taking this factor into account, it is necessary to increase the amount of drinking water, the volume of treatment and discharge of wastewater, the quality of bath water, etc.
Within this framework, Visit València designs tools for collecting and evaluating good practices in the tourism sector, as well as indicators, as well as evaluating the online tool with socio-economic agents of the local tourism sector, and organizes training workshops for public entities.
The consortium that forms part of this project is also made up of other European cities in the Italian regions of Veneto and Emilia Romagna, Greece (Rethymnon) and France (Herault), the University of Patras (Greece), institutions dedicated to water management as the Water Board of Lemesos (Cyprus), the Euro-Mediterranean Water Institute Foundation, the Institute of Agriculture and Tourism (Croatia), the Regional Development Foundation and the Sustainable Energy and Water Conservation Unit of Malta.
