Climate Smart Baltic Beaches and Tourism

General Information

Baltic Sea coastal tourism plays a crucial role in the EU Blue Economy, supporting more than 330,000 jobs (Blue Economy Report, EU 2021). However, the sector faces significant challenges due to its sensitivity to climate change, which threatens its economic benefits. To ensure sustainable regional coastal tourism, effective adaptation strategies that rely on climate change data and information are essential. However, such information is difficult to access, understand, and incorporate into decision-making processes, resulting in low awareness and limited utilization of climate change information among municipalities and stakeholders.

BEACH-SOS is an INTERREG Baltic Sea Region project operating in Denmark, Germany and Latvia. The project aims to address this issue by strengthening the capacity of local governments, Blue Flag beaches, coastal tourism businesses, business support units, NGOs, and coastal communities to become "climate-smart." The project focuses on developing the capability to integrate climate change considerations into beach management strategies and providing the best available data and information for coastal tourism adaptation.

BEACH-SOS seeks to garner support from various Baltic actors and intends to produce four co-developed outputs. These outputs include: 1) sustainable adaptation pathways for coastal/beach tourism; 2) a climate-smart community action program for beach adaptation; 3) the assessment and development of indicators and criteria for climate-smart, and resilient tourist beaches; 4) the establishment of a Baltic Sea Region information exchange network for climate resilient beach tourism.

Hereon serves as the lead partner of the BEACH-SOS project.

EU-Programme Acronym and Subprogramme Area	INTERREG BALTIC SEA Programme 2021-27
Project Type	Small Project
Contract Number	#S025
Co-ordinator	Helmholtz-Zentrum hereon GmbH (DE)

Funding for the Project (€)	Funding for Hereon (€)
398,785	149,547

Contact Person at Hereon

Dr David Cabana, Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), phone:+49 40 226338476 and Dr Louis Celliers, Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), phone: +49 40 226338459 E-mail contact

Participants

Danish Outdoor Council (DK), EUCC - Die Küsten Union Deutschland e.V. (DE), Foundation for Environmental Education Latvia (LV), Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE) (UK), Municipality of Gdańsk, Gdansk Sports Centre (PL), Saulkrasti Municipality (LV)

Last Update: 08. January 2024