• To plan tourism at regional level with respect for the environment
  
  
• To develop and promote ecological and cultural tourism
  
  
• To introduce environmental management to tourist areas and activities
  
  
• To devise a Pan-European, innovative methodology for tourism planning
  
  
• To create new employment in alternative forms of tourism.

The ECOSERT project aims to prepare and initiate common working methods and on-the-ground actions to ensure sustainable environmental management of natural and cultural resources through tourism planning at regional or sub-regional level. The project aims to improve environmentally degraded and economically isolated and depressed regions by putting into place co-ordinated, cross-sectoral environmental and tourism strategies (under a common methodology) and new implementation frameworks for both intra-regional and inter-regional co-operation. These will then initiate local eco- and cultural tourism actions in areas suffering from obsolescent land uses, spatial imbalances in economic activity, and unemployment. At the heart of the project is the development of a common methodology for the preparation of a Regional Environmental Sustainable Tourism Plan (RESTP) in the partner regions of ECOSERT (Magnesia, Dee Estuary and Avellino), as an innovative European tool of planning for sustainable tourism.