Resilience thinking for the Mediterranean basin: How to respond to fire, drought, and flood at the landscape level

Key messages

1. The Mediterranean Basin, home to around 7% of the world’s population, is highly vulnerable to climate change, and thus urgently requires enhancing landscape resilience. Rising temperatures, demographic pressure, and unequal access to resources – especially between the North and South – are converging to create systemic risks for people and ecosystems.
2. Increased incidence of wildfires, droughts, and floods – amplified by climate change – has been and is transforming Mediterranean landscapes. Their frequency, intensity, and cascading effects are undermining food security, ecosystem services, carbon sequestration, and livelihoods, particularly in rural areas. Without proactive resilience-enhancing strategies, these risks will deepen and exceed adaptive capacity of the region’s landscapes.
3. Operationalizing resilience requires defining what to make resilient, to which hazards, and for whose benefit. This paper advances that agenda by applying the “Resilience of what, to what, for whom?” framework to Mediterranean rural landscapes, offering a foundation for practical assessment and planning.
4. Tailored resilience strategies are needed for the distinct contexts of the Northern and Southern Mediterranean. In the North (Southern Europe and Türkiye), priorities include restoring mosaic rural landscapes, managing wildfire risk through proactive strategies to reduce fuel load, and reinvigorating low-intensity land uses. In the South (North Africa and parts of the Middle East), resilience efforts should focus on sustaining extensive pastoral systems, improving water retention and drought resilience of cropping systems, and enhancing infrastructure for climate-adapted agricultural practices. Differentiated policies should reflect the contrasting land use, demographic, and climatic pressures across subregions.
5. Inclusive and equitable governance remains a critical dimension of resilience building, particularly in light of power asymmetries and differing stakeholder priorities. While the brief underlines the importance of inclusive processes and avoiding elite capture, a deeper exploration of governance structures and capacities across the region – especially their variation by context – will be essential to inform implementable strategies.

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