Mediterranean or Mediterraneans, Special Issue, Global Environment

The Mediterranean region, as an economic area of strategic importance, can be assumed as an observatory of global development issues and a laboratory in which new strategies of integration between the North and the South can be tested. The Mediterranean region mirrors problems and perspectives at work on the global scale. The strategic dimension of the Mediterranean has increased in recent years due to the geo-economic nature of transformations related to globalization processes. In particular, the gradual shift towards the East of the world's economic center of gravity has enhanced the position of the Mediterranean as an important crossroads linking Asia, Africa and Europe and, in recent years, has increased trade flows and foreign direct investment in the area from emerging economic players - particularly China and India. Moving from the current strategic dimension, to the perception of the Mediterranean throughout history, it emerges how the heterogeneity of the Mediterranean area has always clashed with a strong will to consider it as an unitary space. In a long-term perspective, it is possible to highlight the distinctive features of the Mediterranean region: the orographic configuration, the mild climate, the extraordinary biodiversity that is the result of biogeographic traits associated with the incessant human activity of adaptation and transformation of the landscape. The same political fragmentation and conflicts that characterize Mediterranean history have encouraged, over time, the development of structured trade relationships, as well as intense cultural exchanges. Therefore, on balance between unity and diversity, the Mediterranean has seen a weakening of those elements of homogeneity within the region often invoked by Braudel, to become a fracture zone between the North and the South, a fault line that connects countries with very different environmental frameworks, resource endowments and socio-economic development levels. The environment is probably the one that best represents this "break of unity." The Mediterranean area display a number of structural weaknesses related to the geomorphological and climatic features of the region - high seismicity, presence of hills along the coast, limited extension of the coastal plains, difficulties in land transport, limited water availability during the summer months. Within these common environmental constraints, demographic and economic dynamics intertwine to amplify disparities in terms of per-capita endowment of land and water, efficient use of natural resources and environmental risk prevention and management. Desertification, hydrogeological risk, coastal erosion, the depletion of water sources, and salinization of soils and aquifers, are all problems that occur in a more marked way in the North African and Middle Eastern countries. On this side of the Mediterranean, the strong human pressure on the resources due to population growth has triggered a downward spiral of "natural resources exploitation" in which poverty has encouraged the development of unsustainable practices of natural resources management, which have become a constraint on development that in turn feeds poverty. The demographic and economic disparities between the two shores of the Mediterranean therefore influence human-environment interactions and the mode of exploitation of natural resources. There is also a wide gap with regard to environmental governance. In the European Mediterranean countries, albeit slowly and with considerable resistance, is emerging an environmental conscience that influences policy. Institutions are increasingly involved in the provision of land monitoring and environmental risk management systems. In most of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries, however, cuts in public expenditure imposed by structural adjustment programs and the slow economic recovery have hindered the launch of long term strategies based on sustainable development principles. The originality of this issue of Global Environment resides, therefore, in the attention given to environmental factors and to the impact of economic growth processes on the environment and on local development patterns in the Mediterranean countries.