Mediterranean Sea: a threatened microcosm.

The successive degradation of this historical area was and is a pending topic on Environmental Policy of the UE and the rest of the countries of the Mediterranean Basin (in Africa and Asia).

Its main peculiarity is that this is practically a closed sea. Its water is hardly renewed, only by the straits of Gibraltar (from the Atlantic Ocean) and Bosphorus (from the Black Sea). Furthermore, in the last twenty years, the population of the Mediterranean countries has grown more than fifty millions.

The levels of metal concentration in water (copper, cadmium, lead, zinc, mercury …) have increased so much in different quantities and besides, the residual waters. All of that affects to the marine wildlife and even the human beings, when there are focus of diseases like typhus, salmonella, cholera ... (overall in the south and poor part).

In the last years of the seventies, the Blue Plan was created for elaborate a complete survey of the real state of the sea (water, flora and fauna). It was signed by fourteen of the eighteen Mediterranean countries and it had to be finished with the Millennium.

In spite of that agreement, the Mediterranean Sea, origin of the western culture and civilization, and meeting point among Orient and Occident, has been deteriorated year by year and if we (society and political class) don’t act fast it will be finally a new Dead Sea in only twenty years (in 2020 or 2030). The worst of all is the situation of other aquatic spaces is the same or worse (like the Caspian Sea or the Baikal Lake).

Could the environmental apocalypse come soon? I don’t hope so.