Mediterranean Blue Plan
The Mediterranean Blue Plan, initiated in 1980 under the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), is a cooperative effort among Mediterranean countries to address pollution and protect the marine environment. This initiative emerged from earlier environmental programs, responding to both financial limitations and the urgent need for ecological strategies. The Blue Plan focuses on sustainable economic development by offering guidance to member states and facilitating research on critical areas such as food production, industry, energy, tourism, and transport.
The plan includes regional activity centers that provide valuable information to help governments prevent environmental degradation. Despite facing challenges, such as political tensions and economic disagreements between member nations, the Blue Plan has made progress in reducing pollution levels in the Mediterranean Sea. By promoting ecologically sound practices and fostering collaboration, the Mediterranean Blue Plan aims to ensure a healthier marine ecosystem for future generations. The ongoing efforts highlight the complexities of environmental management in a region with diverse political and economic landscapes.
Mediterranean Blue Plan
Identification: A multinational effort to curb pollution in the Mediterranean Sea
Date: Initiated in 1980
Action plans developed by researchers working with Blue Plan Regional Activity Centers have helped to reduce pollution in the Mediterranean, despite some difficulties posed by the need for international cooperation.
In 1980, under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the nations bordering the Mediterranean Sea signed an agreement setting forth ways in which they would cooperate to reduce pollution of their common sea. The agreement, which soon came to be known as the Blue Plan (or Plan Bleu) for its efforts to clean the Mediterranean’s waters, represented the culmination of several years of international efforts. In 1975, for example, UNEP had provided more than $7 million to the Mediterranean Action Plan (MAP), an earlier program designed to help Mediterranean countries fight pollution. Early in 1979, however, UNEP informed signatories to the 1975 agreement that it would cut back future financial support for MAP. UNEP thus called a February, 1979, conference in Geneva, Switzerland, to prepare a new approach to budgetary demands for immediate environmental remedies and to map out a strategy for protecting the ecology of the Mediterranean basin. In Geneva, a program was drafted identifying twenty-three environmental protection projects demanding immediate attention. A budget of $6.5 million was established, one-half to come from the participating countries, one-fourth from UNEP, and the remainder from contributions of services and staff time by environmental organizations.
Staffs of international researchers formed Blue Plan Regional Activity Centers, which provide information to signatory governments to help them plan future economic development in such a way as to prevent a repetition of the environmental damages that had been done to the sea and its coastline in earlier decades. The role of UNEP is to facilitate communication among these centers and to sponsor international meetings to share findings and propose solutions on a regular basis. Blue Plan researchers have focused their attention on food production, industry, energy use, tourism, and transport. In the early years of the plan, for example, jointly sponsored research suggested that some ecologically harmful industries, such as mining and metallurgical processing and petrochemical production, were overproducing in Mediterranean areas; in such cases, plan officials suggested ecologically preferable and economically logical adjustments.
The attainment of such goals, however, has sometimes been complicated by political and economic factors. For example, efforts to streamline supply and production of coal and steel on a geographic basis were hindered by long-standing tensions between Turkey and Greece. Similarly, Tunisia and Algeria have resisted energy market cooperation with each other, although Tunisia needs the natural gas and petroleum that neighboring Algeria produces; Tunisia thus has continued to pursue, at substantial economic and ecological cost, its own limited petroleum production. Despite such setbacks, Blue Plan efforts have had some effect, and pollution levels in the Mediterranean have dropped.
Bibliography
Blondel, Jacques, et al. The Mediterranean Region: Biological Diversity Through Time and Space. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Skjærset, Jon Birger. “The Effectiveness of the Mediterranean Action Plan.” In Environmental Regime Effectiveness: Confronting Theory with Evidence, by Edward L. Miles et al. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.
Wainwright, John, and John B. Thornes. Environmental Issues in the Mediterranean: Processes and Perspectives from the Past and Present. New York: Routledge, 2004.