Brussels, 22/03/2013 (Agence Europe) - Climate change is putting Mediterranean forests under great threat, an FAO report says. “The Mediterranean forests are expected to be hard hit by climate change and are under severe pressure from population growth. This results in an ever-increasing competition for already scarce food and water resources in the region”, states the report, which was published the day before a meeting in Tlemcen (Algeria) on Thursday 21 March of the Third Mediterranean Forest Week - an event in which eminent specialists from the countries of the southern shore of the Mediterranean and from the EU member states participate. The report was requested by the member states of the committee on Mediterranean forest issues - Silva Mediterranea - at their meeting in Antalya (Turkey) in April 2010.
The authors of the report note that “forest ecosystems and other wooded lands are an important component of landscapes in the Mediterranean region, contributing significantly to rural development, poverty alleviation and food security”. It therefore becomes “urgent to develop a tool for information and monitoring in order to regularly assess these changes and to communicate based on objective and reliable data with the different stakeholders involved in the management of Mediterranean forest ecosystems”.
The report also notes that “with a population (in 2010) of 507 million people on three continents and an extremely rich natural and cultural heritage, the Mediterranean is an “ecoregion”, in which human and economic development is largely dependent on sometimes-scarce natural resources and a vulnerable environment. After thousands of years of co-evolution between ecosystems and societies, human activities are creating substantial environmental pressure, with significant disparities between the northern, southern and eastern rims.”
A few figures are given - the Mediterranean region represents (in 2010): 6.5% of land mass, 7.7% of the global population, 13.5% of global GDP (16.2% in 1990), 32% of international tourism, 60% of people living in water-poor countries globally, and 7.7% of CO2 emissions. In terms of human development index (HDI), the average HDI in the Mediterranean in 2011 was 0.76, which was higher than the global HDI estimated to be 0.68. These figures also indicate major disparities between north and south: “HDI data suggest that poverty levels are still high in Egypt, Morocco, Palestine and the Syrian Arab Republic”. (FB/transl.fl)