At the initiative of the Tunisian civil society, the Tunisian Institute for Strategic Studies (ITES) has made emerge early 2018, a reflection on the need to endow Tunisia with a national maritime strategy, to better control its space and strengthen its presence in this area at regional and international level. Starting from the observation that the blue economy in the broad sense still represents only 12% of the Tunisian GDP, the margins of growth in terms of growth and the creation of new types of jobs have become evident.
But beyond Tunisia, the Mediterranean Sea is at the center of many reflections on how to balance the need for economic growth based on maritime resources and the imperative of increasingly urgent preservation of the environment and the coastline. These issues intersect with the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN 2030 Agenda.
An annual meeting to talk about the sea
The first edition of the Forum de la Mer will be held in Tunisia during the month of October. It is a great annual event dedicated to the sea in all its aspects, and will be held in Bizerte, a city with a heritage ecological, cultural and maritime exceptional and developing.
The objective of the Forum is to address the key issues of environmental conservation, conservation and sustainable use of oceans and seas, the fight against climate change and a sustainable approach to the blue economy. at the top of the agenda and in a Euro-Mediterranean shared and solidarity. It also aims to network Euro-Mediterranean actors (experts, politicians, civil society) whose initiatives, in connection with the sea, too often remain isolated, to promote their development, sharing of expertise and good practices.
The Sea Forum – Bizerte 2018, Euro-Mediterranean Meetings on the Environment and the Blue Economy, will be held from 20 to 22 October at the Bizerte Congress Center. This Forum will be organized around three days of exchanges between experts and meetings with the general public:
– Two days, 20 and 21 October, dedicated to thematic workshops and conferences, around experts and high level speakers from the entire Mediterranean basin, to allow the pooling of expertise and the emergence of a number of recommendations on the themes put forward (in particular environmental issues, coastal erosion, coastal development, aquaculture, fishing, shipbuilding, maritime transport, tourism, maritime trades but also digital perspectives, security and immigration in the Mediterranean basin);
– a third day, on October 22, organized around a plenary, gathering high political figures, great witnesses and emblematic figures in the field of the environment and the world of the sea, during which will be unveiled a study strategic focus on Tunisia’s blue economy.
During these three days, the first Feasts of the sea of Bizerte will be organized around a village of the sea which will propose, in the old port, many cultural activities and urban interventions (shows, concerts, exhibitions, gastronomy, nautical animations, boat stops, …), open to a very wide audience.
The event is organized by the Tunisian Institute for Strategic Studies (ITES), with the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) and The Blue Season. The event is under the patronage of the President of the Republic of Tunisia and in partnership with FAO (United Nations), the European Union, the French Embassy in Tunisia.
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