Description

The project consisted of a comprehensive study of the Carbon Footprint (hereinafter, CF) applicable to rural accommodation, in which deductive, statistical and empirical methods were used to determine the systematics, variables, processes and other aspects to be identified, characterised and quantified in order to calculate the CO2 emissions of the accommodation as an indicator of its sustainability, expressed in functional units representative of the activity (night, person, year, etc.), which led to the development of a standard methodology applicable to this sub-sector.

The quality of the air and natural resources in protected environments of the Natura 2000 network, in which these establishments for inland tourism are frequently located (with Extremadura and Castilla-León as the communities with the highest occupancy rates in Spain), made it particularly relevant for this type of activity (in these territories) to direct its management towards improving its sustainability and compatibility with the environment.

To this end, direct and indirect impacts of CF at local level on the values of the protected area were identified, in order to finally establish a proposal for measures to prevent, mitigate and/or compensate for these impacts, which could be extrapolated to all rural accommodation in these territories.

Budget:
20.000,00 €
Financed by:
Biodiversity Foundation and the AEI Tourism Cluster of Extremadura

General objective

To increase the competitiveness and differentiation of the inland tourism offer of the rural accommodation subsector in Extremadura and Castilla-León by means of actions that direct their management towards improving their environmental sustainability through the control and minimisation of their CO2 emissions.

Specific objectives

  • To determine a verifiable and validated system for calculating the Carbon Footprint of a typical rural accommodation.
  • Identification, characterisation, analysis and assessment of the impacts of the Carbon Footprint of a typical rural accommodation on a local scale on the values of the Red Natura 2000 sites in Extremadura and Castilla-León.
  • Identification and description of preventive measures, mitigation and/or compensation of impacts of the Carbon Footprint of a typical rural accommodation.
  • Dissemination of results to other Autonomous Regions.