By: Elisa Lunardelli, Intern for Human Rights and the Environment Thematic Area
In September 2023, the Mediterranean Basin experienced its deadliest storm on record. Cyclone Daniel formed in southeastern Europe, striking Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece before crossing the sea, laden with humidity from the abnormally warm waters, and devastating Libya. According to scientists, extreme meteorological events like this are becoming increasingly frequent and intense in the region, clear effects of climate change.
This event highlights the Mediterranean’s interconnectedness as a relatively homogeneous climatic region, while showing that climate change hits hardest where societies are most fragile. In Libya, political instability and widespread poverty worsened the cyclone’s devastation, leading to significantly more deaths, missing persons, and damage than in the other affected countries.
Since ancient times, environmental factors have influenced population movements. Yet, in recent years, the impacts of environmental stress and extreme hazards are negatively affecting existing inequalities and access to resources while creating new challenges, leading more people to seek better living conditions elsewhere.
The Mediterranean Basin is the site of distinctive social-ecological dynamics because of the colonial history linking Europe, Africa and the Middle East, reflected in contemporary economic inequalities and migratory movements. Climate change exacerbates underlying tensions whilst simultaneously presenting a new context for cooperation. However, despite facing heightened climate risks and regional instability, especially across the Middle East and North Africa, coordinated legal and political responses remain fragmented.
Inspired by existing regional approaches that have led to the creation of free-movement communities, this blogpost calls for a comprehensive and inclusive Mediterranean strategy to address environmental mobility. Such a framework should bridge the North-South divide, stretch across continents, and promote genuine interstate dialogue. To be effective, it must include Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries and avoid a top-down, EU-driven approach, instead fostering shared ownership and regional cooperation. Environmental mobility could be a new entry point for regional cooperation, inspired by Le pensée de midi – an anti-hegemonic vision of Mediterranean regionality evoked at different times across history
A fragmented response
Despite growing recognition of environmental migration in key documents like the 1992 COP, 2010 Cancun Agreements, and Paris Agreement, protection for those displaced by environmental factors remains overall incoherent and inconsistent. No UN body has a direct mandate, and most efforts rely on voluntary, non-binding instruments such as the Nansen Initiative’s Agenda for the Protection of Cross-Border Displaced Persons in the Context of Disasters and Climate Change (‘the Protection Agenda’) and Migrants in Countries in Crisis (MICIC) Guidelines. While global frameworks acknowledge environmental migration, they offer no binding obligations; national solutions, like those in Austria, Italy, the U.S., and some Nordic countries, are rare, limited, and applied narrowly, resulting in fragile and weak protection.
Regional migration governance has expanded in response to limited global cooperation, offering tailored and experimental platforms to address environmental mobility through economic regimes, human rights instruments, and consultative processes. The EU incorporates environmental factors into migration policy; the Americas have developed human rights-based frameworks; focuses on short-term movement with limited protections; and African bodies like ECOWAS and IGAD have attempted to address climate-related displacement through regional or sub-regional approaches. While regional frameworks allow for consensus-building and context-specific solutions, they still face significant challenges, including political resistance and funding limitations, particularly in the Global South.
Why is the Mediterranean important?
In 2024 alone, 45.8 million people were displaced within their countries due to environmental disasters. This statistic likely underestimates the real scale of the problem, especially because it does not include people who crossed borders, as these movements remain poorly documented. One reason for this gap is that countries of origin may be reluctant to acknowledge that they have failed to protect their populations. At the same time, countries of destination are often unwilling to recognize climate-related migration as a legitimate ground for legal protection.
Environmental factors rarely act in isolation. They interact with social, economic, and political dynamics, which means it is often difficult to clearly identify the environment as the sole cause of migration. Similar events can lead to very different outcomes depending on the context. Local vulnerability and the capacity of governments or communities to respond make a huge difference. Where people receive timely, fair, and effective support, they may be able to stay and adapt. But where assistance is absent, unequal, or poorly managed, people may be forced to leave their homes even when they would rather stay or, on the contrary, they are trapped, unable to move due to lack of resources.
This complex reality weighs heavily on the Mediterranean, where diverse migration flows intersect with mounting climate pressures, compounding already serious challenges. Environmental shocks strike societies marked by demographic imbalances, weak governance, and political instability, and even conflict. Climate change acts as a risk multiplier, deepening existing vulnerabilities and straining already fragile systems.
For over 10,000 years, the Mediterranean has been a cradle of human civilization. Its mild climate and the presence of the sea have supported life, trade, and cultural exchange across continents. Today, however, this once-stable region is undergoing dramatic change. The Mediterranean is warming about 20% faster than the global average, making it one of the world’s hotspots for anthropogenic climate change according to the IPCC. This rapid warming is causing more frequent and intense heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, water scarcity, flooding, and sea level rise. These impacts are deeply felt across ecosystems, cities, and agriculture, especially in low-lying and densely populated coastal areas, like the Nile Delta and African island states.
The Mediterranean remains one of the busiest and most dangerous migration corridors in the world. While irregular arrivals to the European Union declined by 20% in 2025, the Central Mediterranean route, especially through Libya, continues to be the most active and deadly. Migration patterns have changed over time: from mostly regional movement in the 1950s, to labor migration in the 1960s, to increasingly securitized flows since 2015. The EU has outsourced border control to third countries, signed deals to prevent departures, and hardened its external borders. These policies shift responsibility onto often unstable transit countries, undermining migrants’ rights and protections. At the same time, countries like Tunisia, Morocco, and Libya, once transit points, have become involuntary destinations, at times straining local communities and migrants alike as resources grow scarce. Addressing these complex and interconnected challenges requires strategic cooperation among Mediterranean countries to manage migration and environmental risks sustainably.
The limits of regional cooperation so far
The Mediterranean has long been a crossroads of cultures and a hub of strategic competition. Since the 1980s, the fragmentation of the Arab world has allowed global powers to assert influence with differing agendas. The United States has focused on energy security and military interests; Russia has supported Syria and Iran to challenge Western dominance; China deepens economic ties through a non-interventionist stance; and Iran advances its ideological goals via the Axis of Resistance. Israel prioritizes its vision of security, while the EU promotes an agenda aiming for stability through multilateralism. In recent years, Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar have increased their regional influence by leveraging economic power to advance divergent agendas.
In this context, regional cooperation remains weak, despite decades of efforts to build synergies. These initiatives date back to the post-World War II period, evolving from cultural exchanges to structured frameworks like the 1995 Barcelona Process and the Union for the Mediterranean, the only organization that brings together all countries from both shores.
Creating pathways for cooperation in the Mediterranean remains deeply challenging. Legacies of colonialism and historical hostilities persist alongside newer forms of external interference and dominance. Securitized approaches and the instrumentalization of migration further strain relations, while non-transparent governance, institutional weaknesses, and the rise of populism hinder reform. Bridging different legal, social, and political systems proves difficult, as does reconciling divergent national agendas and addressing stark economic inequalities. Political rivalries, resource disputes, and sovereignty concerns continue to undermine trust and prevent meaningful delegation of authority to regional bodies. Ethnic, religious, and ideological tensions deepen fragmentation, while responses to common challenges often remain reactive, short-sighted, and disconnected from long-term strategic vision.
Trade across the Mediterranean has reached historic lows, with few efforts to revive it, mainly through ambiguous energy strategies and bilateral deals. Environmental cooperation, including agreements on biodiversity and pollution control, exist but remains insufficient to meet the urgency of climate threats. Migration cooperation gained momentum with the 2015 Valletta Summit and the launch of the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, yet it continues to expose deep structural imbalances, often rooted in unresolved post-colonial dynamics.
The externalization of border control, once an emergency measure, has become a central, normalized pillar of EU migration governance, embedded in legal frameworks and political discourse. Public narratives around these arrangements no longer obscure their conditionalities or the human rights violations they entail. A troubling level of desensitization has emerged: actions against those attempting to cross the Mediterranean no longer provoke outrage but are increasingly perceived as routine.
A new vision: “Mediterranean thinking”
Amid these complex dynamics, EU Commissioner Šuica will present a New Pact for the Mediterranean in October 2025, aiming to strengthen cohesion between the EU and MENA countries, particularly in economic and geo-strategic fields. While the initiative addresses areas such as security, trade, youth employment, renewable energy, and cultural heritage, it signals a shift in focus. Migration, once central, has been deprioritized in favor of green transition and economic revitalization. Although the Pact encourages academic collaboration and bottom-up institution-building to reduce brain drain, its agenda emphasizes containment and resilience over human rights or structural inclusion. The Commissioner also seeks to mobilize regional and local actors, involving ALERM and aligning with the Union for the Mediterranean Strategy to reinvigorate stalled cooperation.
Regional cooperation in the Mediterranean holds significant potential. It can strengthen security, improve mobility, and address migration and environmental pressures more effectively. However, EU-led frameworks often overlook the perspectives of Southern partners, highlighting the need for a more inclusive dialogue based on mutual respect and shared responsibility. Cooperation can yield tangible benefits, such as harmonized legal standards, stronger protections, balanced labor markets, and sustainable development grounded in human dignity. It also enables knowledge exchange, dispute resolution, and climate justice through the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities.
While full integration may be unlikely, fostering trust and tackling specific issues, such as climate-induced migration, through targeted, context-driven initiatives offers a realistic path forward.
The Mediterranean, with its 46,000 km of coastlines facing the similar environmental stress, reminds us that isolation is not an option. What happens on one shore inevitably reverberates across the others. The Mediterranean teaches and demands us not to abandon hope in dialogue and cooperation, for doing so endangers everyone. Today’s crises call for a shared path towards collective effort and common solutions.
This vision challenges the individualism that drives current global economy and international relations, revealing that human, economic, and social resources, exist, but must be more fairly redistributed. Real cooperation means crafting more effective, just, and inclusive solutions, raising standards of protection, building trust, and keeping the door open to long-term dialogue. It means enriching ourselves through knowledge exchange and designing responses that are precise, context-sensitive, and sustainable.
Perhaps justice, too, can begin here, with a shift in perspective and the recognition that we are part of a common future, one that cannot exist without the taking into consideration other populations. Le pensée de midi challenges us to seek balance, cooperation, and a shared horizon. The Mediterranean doesn’t need just another agreement; it needs visionaries willing to act on a different logic, one of solidarity, not separation.
