The main objectives are defined as follows:

• To co-ordinate research efforts on sustainable use of natural resources, in particular soil and water, in the Mediterranean Region, at the interface of urbanization and productive activities, mainly agriculture and tourism.
• To prevent unsustainable use of natural resources and to increase productivity in the use of scarce resources.
• To promote public/private partnerships in research on ecosystems and to lead to integrated environmental technologies in a user-friendly and scenario-building perspective.
• To establish sustainable database links and electronic networking concerning socio-economic and biophysical aspects in the use of natural resources.

The key activities are organized into work packages, and involve:

• Organizing three Meetings, aiming at discussing (i) the structure of interdependency between urbanization and agriculture, (ii) the development of tourism and coastal zone management, (iii) the promotion of sustainable local economic growth in a context of globalization.
• Building scenarios in order to highlight local/global agreements and conflicts on environmental decisions and actions, by using meta-analytical, communicative, social learning approaches, and in particular the "soft approaches" recently emerging from the Operations Research field, including problem structuring methods, future studies and sensitivity analysis.
• Making data, informations and results exchangeable and comparable among partners, by using management information systems (MISs) and by promoting analytical routines leading to comparable results.

Tunis Meeting

Activities were carried out applying the Future Workshops technique: a Futures Studies participatory method that seeks to encourage people to explore alternative visions of the future. The process of Future Workshops has been appropriately modified to fit the Tunis application and the sessions involved two days of work with the stakeholders. The goal of the model was to involve the participants into an interactive and structured process aimed at building and exploring future alternative images for Tunis.

The three main visions generated from the workshops were: the technological city; the social city; the sustainable/ecological city.

The final Future Workshops’ phase, the implementation phase, moved from the visions to the development of draft scenarios for Tunis 2030. Analysing the visions through the filter of the various problematic issues (as identified in the first phase) and of practical limits and difficulties to their real implementation, the draft scenarios were attained.

A traditional scientific academic meeting was carried out in Tunis, and different experiences were discussed to indicate trends, actions and connections for a sustainable use of local resources, particularly soil and water, in the face of rapid and massive urban growth, pressure of tourism (especially coastal tourism), specialization of agriculture and land impact of agricultural trade, affecting large areas in the South-Med region. The meeting involved 39 contributors of 8 Countries, mainly Mediterranean. Papers geographically focused on three main areas (Tunisia, Turkey, Italy), with extensions to Morocco, Albania, Jordan, Greece: however, some theoretical and methodological papers were also presented, as well as papers dealing with tools for resource management. Therefore papers were overall well assorted and with a multi-dicipline approach, as hoped at the beginning, and a good deal of them will be selected for publication in a book of proceedings.