The mission of the "Lebanese Committee for the Safeguard of Tire" (CSLT) has lasted for over forty years. Since 1980 it has been committed in safeguarding the environmental and cultural heritage of the city, its sustainable development. For millennia, the centre located in southern Lebanon has been a protagonist of Mediterranean history, and CSLT's bet is that it will continue to be so thanks to its inhabitants.

"Involving students in the conservation of the Tyre Nature Reserve" is the name of the project with which the Committee was awarded the funding allocated by SPA/RAC within the ENSERES. Thanks to the project, hundreds of local and provincial students will take part in conferences dedicated to the archaeological and environmental value of what has been a natural reserve protected by the Lebanese state since 1998.

Workshops and visits will allow young people to get in touch with the natural and historical riches of the site. The experience will then translate into an essay in which students will express their relationship with the Natural Reserve, propose ideas and strategies for the future. The best essay will win a prize. Not just young people, though: the CSLT project also includes a vast awareness campaign in the press and social networks that will also target the rest of the local population.

"The project that we are going to implement thanks to ENSERES is the latest of many initiatives carried out in four decades. Lebanon has gone through, and is still going through very difficult times, but we are here to defend Tire and make it a model of dialogue and sustainability”, says Maha el Khalil Chalabi, head of CSLT. Thanks to the association, Tyre has been recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, and has been able to repel the projects that willed to transform the area into a huge commercial port that would have destroyed its enormous historical and environmental value.

The Tyre Nature Reserve is one of the two Marine Protected Areas of Lebanon. It encompasses a sandy coastal area of 3.8 square kilometres and a 113 square kilometres marine quadrant. The coastline is home to one of the few sandy beaches left in Lebanon, certainly the longest, and a wetland protected by the Ramsar Convention. The mosaic of waters, swamps and dunes is home to rare and fragile animal and plant species, such as the loggerhead and green sea turtles (which come here to lay their eggs), the Arabian spiny mouse, wall lizards and the sea narcissus. Beauty and complexity don't stop at the environmental context. The reserve also includes the Old City, with the ancient port and souk, an agricultural area and an archaeological site, which includes the Phoenician springs of Ras El Ain. An ancient, fragile heritage that only the energy of the new generations can protect in the era of climate change.