POLARIS

Impacts & Results

This project intends to undertake a comparative study of three different regions: Siberia (Russia), Scandinavia (Sweden) and Patagonia (Argentina). These regions have a series of common features as regards their natural and cultural heritage, and are destined to expereince similar changes due to the global warmun and globalisation processes. The protection and the promotion of cultures, territories and heritages strenghten a socio-economical development process for local communities. Such sustainable valorization sould generate high level know-how and good practices that can be transferred to specific territories with national and international protection (National Park, National Reserves, UNESCO labels, etc.). These regions have fragile ecosystems that can be rapidly damaged by mass tourism or by not well-controlled development strategy implemented by public institutions or private companies. POLARIS project aims at studying these extreme regions, training professionals working in public administrations in order to improve their educational background, and students with postgraduate curricula linked to tourism, geography, natural heritage, politics and social economics. The project results could benefit to local communities: the development of touristic clusters and sustainable tourism can be highly beneficial for the local economies and for the whole economic development of the selected regions.