CIRCUS

Conscious Tourism for More Sustainable Destinations

CIRCUS (Conscious Tourism in Resilient Cities and Urban Spaces) addresses one of the South Baltic Region’s growing challenges: how to balance increasing tourism with the need to protect local environments, infrastructure and communities. Tourists often behave differently from residents, generating more waste, consuming more resources and relying on convenience due to limited local knowledge.

As visitor numbers continue to grow, destinations need new ways to make sustainable choices easy, attractive and rewarding without compromising the visitor experience. Through conscious tourism, CIRCUS helps destinations become more resilient while strengthening their attractiveness and competitiveness.

Making sustainable choices the easy choice

CIRCUS combines circular economy principles with behavioural design to create practical solutions that improve both sustainability and visitor experience. Through pilot activities across the South Baltic Region, the project develops and tests innovative approaches that help visitors make more responsible choices while supporting municipalities, tourism operators and local businesses.

In parallel, we work on:

• analysing tourist behaviour and environmental challenges in pilot destinations
• developing the Conscious Tourism Model to encourage responsible visitor behaviour
• creating practical Sustainable Tourism Guidelines for municipalities, tourism operators and attractions
• establishing a cross-regional Conscious Tourism Hub for knowledge sharing and replication

Project goals

CIRCUS aims to strengthen the long-term sustainability, resilience and attractiveness of tourism destinations across the South Baltic Region. By combining circular solutions, behavioural insights and cross-border collaboration, the project will demonstrate how conscious tourism can reduce environmental impacts while creating better visitor experiences and supporting local value creation.

CIRCUS is co-funded by the European Union through the Interreg South Baltic Programme 2021-2027.