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Sustainable development and green marketing are two terms that dominate in the modern era. The aim of this paper is to examine how green marketing can contribute as a strategic tool to the sustainable development of less favoured areas, focussing on women's agro-tourism cooperatives and their impact on local and national level. Women's agro-tourism cooperatives, whose number has considerably increased in Greece in the past 20 years, are a perfect example for the application of green economy. Despite certain obstacles, they fulfil the principles of sustainable development, taking under consideration the three pillars of sustainability: economic growth, environmental protection and social equity. The future of women's cooperatives in Greece is very promising; the vast majority has already survived the economic crisis and there is room for further improvement regarding product, price, place and promotion.

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Sustainable development is difficult to be achieved in mountain regions because of their sensitivity to climate change. The rapid development of mountain tourism worldwide during the last years makes the goal for sustainable mountain tourism even more challenging. Key factor to the development of mountain tourism in Europe was the function of ski centres. According to the spirit of the Brundtland Report ski centres are not in general sustainable, because they may have economic benefits but they negatively affect the other two pillars of sustainability: environment and society. The present paper focuses on a ski resort in Greece, attempting to assess the impact of mountain tourism on the sustainable development of the area. Ski resorts played a crucial role to the bloom of mountain tourism in Greece. Its evolution is a relatively recent phenomenon which has been affected by the economic crisis that afflicts the country in the past years. Demographic data compared with tourism indicators were used to assess the environmental impact of tourism in the area. Moreover, meteorological data were used in order to examine the correlation of climatic conditions and the number of visitors. The results show that the ski centre in Elatohori despite the economic benefits has a major environmental impact, especially because of the increased carbon emissions caused by the visitors of the area. Additionally, the climatic conditions (precipitation and temperature, especially the absolute maximum air temperature) affect the number of visitors.

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