The EU-funded RAINFOREST project has successfully concluded its work with a clear takeaway for island and Mediterranean destinations: what ends up on tourists’ plates — and what gets thrown away — matters for nature, biodiversity, water, land, and the resilience of Cyprus’s tourism economy.

 

The RAINFOREST project co-produced transformative knowledge to accelerate change for biodiversity by identifying, evaluating, and supporting practical sustainable pathways across different food and biomass value chains. The Cyprus case study, led by The Cyprus Institute, examined how food provision in tourism connects visitor demand, hotel operations, imports, waste generation, and environmental impacts across Cyprus and beyond, providing practical entry points for transformation. It combined evidence from system mapping, stakeholder engagement, and quantitative tools to identify actionable solutions for both policy-makers and industry.

 

In simple terms, the research followed a map–measure–discuss–recommend approach. First, it mapped Cyprus tourism and food-chain patterns using tourism statistics and food production and trade data. Second, it collected primary evidence through hotel and tourist surveys. Third, it quantified impacts using three complementary tools: (i) Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of typical hotel buffet menus, (ii) Waste Input–Output (WIO) analysis to track waste spillovers across the economy, and (iii) the FABIO model to estimate land and water footprints embodied in tourism food consumption by commodity and country of origin. These tools answer different but interlinked questions, offering a new perspective and a more holistic understanding of impacts and pressures.

 

The findings show that tourism in Cyprus exerts a modest but important pressure on the national food system, particularly for animal-based foods and beverages. Across major food categories, tourism typically accounts for around 4–8% of total food supply, with higher shares for livestock-related products. This helps explain why tourism food demand matters not only for hospitality businesses, but also for import dependency and resource use across the wider economy.

 

The LCA results indicate that beef, dairy and fish products are leading contributors to biodiversity-related impacts in typical hotel buffet settings, while plant-based foods and leaner proteins such as chicken generally perform better. The results also show that buffet composition matters: red meat tends to produce higher impacts, while more balanced or plant-forward menu designs can reduce pressure on terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems. These findings provide a strong evidence base for practical menu redesign rather than relying only on generic sustainability messaging.

 

The WIO analysis highlights that the tourism food issue is not only about what happens in hotel kitchens, but also about economy-wide spillovers. For the accommodation and food services sector, the study estimates that for every 1 tonne of waste produced by the sector, 4.1 tonnes are generated economy-wide, with a particularly strong effect in animal and mixed food waste. In addition, the sector generates 19 jobs per €1 million of final demand and about 121.7 tonnes of total waste per €1 million of final demand, underlining both its economic importance and its wider environmental footprint.

 

The FABIO model adds a supply-chain perspective by tracing embodied land and water use related to tourism food demand. Analysis shows that tourism-related land use linked to food consumption declined between 2010 and 2022, but remained strongly dominated by pigmeat, with beef peaking mid-decade and poultry increasing in relative importance. On water, the study shows that the green water footprint (rainwater embedded in feed and food crops) is much larger than the blue water footprint (irrigation water). The latter is mostly related to Cyprus-based water use and accounts for roughly 60–70%, while green water is more import-driven, with a large share embodied in European supply chains and a smaller but still material share from Latin America.

 

These quantified findings directly informed the case-study recommendations. At national level, the core recommendation is to explicitly integrate tourism food-system sustainability into tourism strategy, including a dedicated action plan for sustainable food in tourism, targets for local sourcing, support for agritourism, and guidance on lower-impact food options. At industry level, the recommendations focus on sustainable menu planning and procurement, reducing red meat, improving buffet design and replenishment practices to reduce waste, using seasonal products, and improving transparency and guest engagement through credible labelling, storytelling and digital tools such as QR codes.

 

A key milestone in the Cyprus case study was the Policy Business Forum organised in Nicosia on 4 December 2025. Invited key stakeholders, representing public authorities, sectoral associations, hotels, environmental NGOs, and research and innovation organisations, received the draft white paper in advance and discussed the main findings from the mapping, surveys and quantification tools before moving into a structured dialogue on policy integration, sustainable value chains, menus and food waste, tourist engagement, and collaborative governance.

 

The workshop validated the core findings and strengthened the implementation focus of the recommendations. Stakeholders emphasised the need for clearer indicators and data sharing (including hotel-level reporting on sourcing and food waste), stronger cross-sector coordination (potentially through DMOs or similar platforms), chef training on environmental footprints and low-impact menu design, and practical digital tools for traceability and surplus redistribution. The final White Paper also records stakeholder interest in turning sustainability into a competitiveness advantage for Cyprus, provided claims are backed by credible data and avoid greenwashing.

 

Lastly, the RAINFOREST team, along with CyI researchers from the PREVENT project, attended the European Conference on Sustainable Tourism held under the auspices of Cyprus’ EU council presidency in Nicosia on 27 February 2026. The conference included high-level perspectives — notably from EU Commissioners Apostolos Tzitzikostas on sustainable transport and tourism in Europe, and Costas Kadis on the European Ocean Pact. These themes and keynote presentations align directly to the research evidence provided by The Cyprus Institute: sustainable tourism and food systems requires measurable action across supply chains, and can become a lever for biodiversity protection, resource efficiency and resilient destination development, both in Cyprus and in other Mediterranean destinations facing similar pressures.