Why the entire Mediterranean is under stress

Jellyfish plagues and plastic waste are just the most obvious symptoms of how things are in the Mediterranean. Global warming is threatening the small ocean between Europe and Africa with long-term dangers.

Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is already planning to surrender. The small community in the south of the Camargue still attracts many pilgrims and tourists every year. Some are drawn to the shrines of Saints Maria Jakobäa and Maria Salome, others use the small coastal town as a starting point for excursions to the Camargue’s swamp and lake landscape. However, Saintes-Maries could soon fall victim to sea level rise. “There are concrete plans and financial estimates in case the municipality has to be abandoned in the near future,” says Wolfgang Cramer from the Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE) in Aix-en-Provence. On other, uninhabited stretches of coast in the Camargue, dikes are already being removed to let nature take its course.

It is not only in Saintes-Maries that one is confronted with drastic environmental changes. The entire Mediterranean region is under stress. In addition to global warming and the resulting rise in sea level, there are other factors that are changing the Mediterranean environment at considerable speed. The human influence in this region goes back a long way: The northern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean Sea were settled by Neanderthals 75,000 to 30,000 years ago, about 40,000 years ago it was also possible homo sapiens down here. Since antiquity, increasing human settlement has probably become a massive influencing factor, write Mathias Hafner and Rüdiger Rudolf from the Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, authors of the book “Mediterranean Life”, in an article for the Geographical Review. “For us as biologists, change is normal,” says Hafner. “Due to the additional pressure that we humans create, we are dealing with a change that is taking place too quickly, which is sometimes overtaxing the system.”