Rapporto sulle economie del Mediterraneo. Edizione 2019

The focus of the 2019 edition of the Report on the Economies of the Mediterranean is the Environment: it studies its interrelationship with the economic and social dynamics in the countries bordering the Mediterranean, tries to outline the changes and the impact on the territories, provides a measure of the costs in terms of human lives and quality of life that environmental pollution produces. Climate change is an established fact and its impact on the environment and on the territories is manifested through extreme phenomena, once very rare, but now reaching a worrying frequency. They increase the costs in terms of dissipated resources, they increase the difficulties for the ecosystem to maintain sustainable growth paths, very large areas of land become inaccessible for agricultural exploitation or breeding. The economic and social impact on entire countries is enormous, and this is particularly true for some areas of the Mediterranean basin. And it is a fact that anthropogenic pressures and economic and social phenomena are firmly intertwined with the dynamics of the climate in a double causality ratio: inefficient and intensive production and emissions influence climate change and these, to them time, affect desertification processes, migration and the ability of entire economies to sustain the population. And yet, These phenomena are often treated and studied through mono-disciplinary approaches; on the one hand, the humanities, on the other hand, climatology, physics and hard sciences. In addition to providing a snapshot and analysis of the economic-environmental conditions in the area of the Mediterranean, the 2019 Report attempts to break this barrier and presents a series of multidisciplinary studies with a unique focus. The objective is to provide a more articulated interpretation of a more and more relevant problem that unites all the countries of the area, and to develop useful policy guidelines.