TREBLE co-organized a half-day workshop in Riga together with Race For The Baltic, supported by CBSS and Clarion Collection Hotel Valdemars. This was the second workshop organized by Race For The Baltic in Riga and gathered 32 participants to an inspiring event with lectures and discussions.

Apart from Fair Travel, other invited speakers were the Latvian Ministry of Economics, Clarion Collection Hotel Valdemars, Destination Sigtuna, Innovation Norway, Enterprise Estonia and Radisson Blu Ridzene Hotel.

The agenda for the workshop was to bring together key stakeholders in the tourism industry around “how to approach and embed sustainable tourism in the Baltic Sea Region”, with focus on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The aim was to offer definition and inspiration for sustainable tourism practices as well as to work with the participants to identify clear paths and solutions towards creating a more systemic and holistic approach to the industry in order to secure sustainable economic growth in the region.

This was the second TREBLE workshop and the last one before the Summer break. Upcoming workshops will be held in Estonia in August together with expected additional workshops in Poland and Karlskrona.

TREBLE is a project based on the tourism sector to contribute to the EU 2020 and European Blue Growth agenda through sustainable growth, and to bring forward sustainable rural development and employment opportunities in the Baltic Sea Region. Read the full description of it here.

TREBLE project invited stakeholders and those interested in sustainability issues in the tourism industry, to a half-day workshop in Gothenburg during the TUR2014 Expo.

This was the first workshop of the project, and gathered some 30 participants, listening in to inspiring presentations from award-winning Swedish ecotourism companies Wild Sweden and Urnatur together with TREBLE partners BEF Lithuania, CBSS, Estonian Ecotourism Association and Fair Travel. The topic of the workshop was sustainable tourism development within the Baltic Sea Region, and though the participation numbers were a bit low, the discussions that followed were all very energetic, inspirational and thoughtful.

One participant concluded:

“The academia need to translate their message into “normal language” and put it into common sense and as a part of an integrated system in order to change the mindset and attitude of people and politicians. There is a need for Science and academia but the dialogue needs to be more efficient in order for politicians to set sound and reasonable policies, which are effective and understandable. Take the knowledge and put it into common sense for people. We do not need to speak about eco etc. start to speak about a real modern lifestyle. The message should be: Modern people do no travel so much, they do not waste energy, they eat healthy and sell this as a lifestyle – We need to rethink the idea of a modern human”

More workshops are to come and given the passion shown in the first workshop, it will be very interesting to see what might come of the rest of the activities organized under the TREBLE banner.

TREBLE is a project based on the tourism sector to contribute to the EU 2020 and European Blue Growth agenda through sustainable growth, and to bring forward sustainable rural development and employment opportunities in the Baltic Sea Region. Read the full description of it here.