The final event of the ENSERES project brought together the team that for over two years has worked for to build and transfer a model of integrated and sustainable management of the marine-coastal areas of the Mediterranean. The project partners, the representatives of the territories involved and those of the associations that benefited from the subgrants met on 19 October in Tunis at the Ramada Hotel for yet another and most important moment of dialogue.

The works were opened by Dania Abdul Malak, Director of the European Topic Center on Spatial Analysis and Synthesis - University of Malaga (ETC-UMA), institution leader of the project. Dr. Abdul Malak retraced the birth, development and results of ENSERES, highlighting the numerous lessons learned along the way as well as the progressive convergence of the actors in the shared paradigm whose goal is to be extend to the entire Mediterranean basin: practices in the sustainable management of coastal areas capable of rebuilding the balance between ecosystems and the communities that inhabit them.

Hedi Chebili, general Director of Environment and Quality of Life - Ministry of Environment of Tunisia, expressed appreciation for the work carried out by ENSERES, which with its activities has intervened in sectors such as fishing and tourism that constitute fundamental hubs of the Tunisian economy, and yet must find ways to reduce their impact on the environment. Khalil Attia, Director of the UNEP MAP Specially Protected Areas Regional Activity Center (SPA RAC), took the opportunity to invite all the institutions to collaborate more actively so that the initial ideas that drive the projects are found more quickly and decisive implementation on the ground.

The same subject was taken up again in the first panel, where Attia and Chebili were joined by Marko Prem, director of PAP/RAC, and Oriol Barba, director of MedCities, all agreeing in reiterating the need for greater coordination between the bodies, at all levels, and open to proposing corrections and alternative processes. Christoph Schroder, geographer of ETC-UMA and coordinator of ENSERES, simultaneously praised the dense exchange of new knowledge and practices that the project was able to bring not only to Tunisia and Lebanon, the two pilot sites, but also to Spain, France and Italy, on whose shores cutting-edge ideas for the sustainability of the economic and environmental future were developed.

In the following session, the theoretical and organizational aspects left room for the experiences made by the pilot sites. Ali Badreddine, marine biologist and director of the Tyre Coast Nature Reserve in Lebanon, analyzed the problem of pollution present in the beautiful Lebanese city, and explained how ENSERES has played a decisive role in bringing together all the public and private actors who can respond to the pressure anthropic burden on the territory. Mahdi Makhlouf, representative of the Municipality of Kerkennah, Ahmed Guidara, engineer of the Municipality of Sfax and Ayman Kilani of APAL (Agency for the Protection and Management of the Coast) similarly illustrated the cases of the Tunisian pilot site, focusing on the role that the municipalities had in ENSERES and on what changes are necessary for institutions to move closer to an integrated model of coastal zones.

Ali Badreddine and Ayman Kilani also took part in the next panel, focused on the exchange programme carried out by ENSERES. Piera Pala, environmental lawyer of the MEDSEA Foundation, talked about the visit to Oristano, Sardinia, where thanks to the efforts of the foundation a "Coast Contract" was born, a complex agreement capable to bring together ten municipalities, public and private actors in the management of the gulf and the Ramsar sites that surround it. Emna Derouiche of SPA/RAC, on the other hand, went through the numerous experiences accumulated during the "Twinning programme" between marine protected areas of Mediterranean importance, and imagined its development with a view on how to thicken the web of relationships and knowledge that arose thanks to these exchanges.

The last session was dedicated to the associations that in the two pilot sites where the subgrants were awarded, using them to have an impact on sustainable tourism, beach cleaning, marine pollution, awareness of youth communities and opportunities present in alternative fishing models. A frank dialogue ensued that highlighted the difficulties encountered as well as the great opportunity represented by ENSERES, a debate that involved all the partners present in the room and contributed to consolidating the foundations for the collective construction of a shared model of integrated management of coastal communities Mediterranean.