Conscious Tourism in Resilient Cities and Urban Spaces – CIRCUS
The CIRCUS project focuses on the development of sustainable, resilient and innovative tourism.
The CIRCUS project promotes conscious tourism by combining a behavioural approach with the principles of the circular economy to enhance visitors’ experiences, strengthen the sustainability of tourist destinations, and implement practices based on the circular economy and efficient resource management in tourism services and infrastructure.
Why we are carrying out this project:
Tourists behave differently from local residents: they stay for a short time, are often unfamiliar with local realities and value convenience. They generate up to twice as much waste and consume twice as much water per day (UNWTO, 2023), and are also more likely to use single-use products. Such behaviour patterns threaten both the conservation of natural and cultural resources and the quality of the visitor experience. To remain competitive, the tourist regions of the southern Baltic must ensure that sustainable development practices are visible to tourists, easy to adopt and attractive.
The project’s activities include: analysing tourists’ behaviour and interactions with urban and cultural attractions; promoting conscious tourism through co-design, implementation and testing of solutions; applying these solutions in the form of practical tools; and developing a coherent regional brand, alongside international activities to disseminate and share the results.
We anticipate that as each site or space strengthens its profile in sustainable tourism, visitor numbers will increase significantly, and visitors will engage in conscious tourism whilst developing an understanding of the circular economy and related behaviours. Three joint solutions will also be developed:
- Conscious Tourism Model
- Guidelines on sustainable tourism for tourist attractions
- Interregional Conscious Tourism Hub
The project involves seven partners from Denmark, Lithuania, Sweden, Germany and Poland, and is led by CLEAN – the Danish Water and Environment Cluster.
Project duration: 26 June 2026 – 26 February 2029 (32 months)
The project is co-financed under the Interreg South Baltic Programme 2021–2027.
Total project budget: EUR 1,855,599.47
Total GMG budget: EUR 258,000.00
of which:
GMG’s own contribution: EUR 51,600.00
GMG grant: EUR 206,400.00