Socio-economic Change

The vulnerability of the Mediterranean socio-ecosystems to climate change can be magnified by human-induced processes that are the result of the deep transformation of rural societies, and their interaction with urban and densely populated areas around the Mediterranean.

These include depopulation, land and rural abandonment, massive land tenure and land use changes, bad soil management practices, infrastructures (dams, roads, etc.), urbanization, and the simplification of the landscape through the introduction of monocultures or under the impact of “perverse subsidies” of policy framework such as the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) in those countries belonging to the European Union, which often favour intensive, resource consuming agro-silvo-pastoral practices versus the more traditional, extensive ones.