The Mediterranean is one of the world’s leading tourism destinations, attracting millions of visitors each year. While tourism provides economic benefits and supports local communities, it also creates significant pressures on fragile marine and coastal ecosystems. The new vulnerability assessment prepared under the Blue Tourism Initiative explores these dynamics in detail.

The report maps tourism-related pressures such as leisure boat activity, cruise traffic, coastal urbanisation and golf tourism, and overlays them with areas of high biodiversity value. The analysis identifies hotspots where ecologically sensitive habitats, such as Posidonia oceanica seagrass meadows or areas important for cetaceans, are exposed to high levels of tourism activity.

Key findings underline that some regions face “cumulative tourism pressures” where both land- and sea-based activities coincide with insufficient protection measures. This creates particular risks for biodiversity, local resilience and long-term sustainability of the tourism sector itself. The assessment also draws attention to regional differences. While EU countries often face pressure despite relatively large protected networks, in non-EU Mediterranean countries, the vulnerability is mainly due to the lack of adequate protection.

The study provides recommendations for policymakers and tourism stakeholders, including improving conservation of sensitive areas, reducing pressures from leisure boat anchoring, and implementing measures against vessel collisions with marine mammals. It also stresses the importance of harmonised tourism data across the region to enable evidence-based decision-making.

The publication forms part of the wider Blue Tourism Initiative (2023–2026), a multi-stakeholder programme implemented by IUCN-Med, IDDRI, eco-union and partners in the Mediterranean, Caribbean and Western Indian Ocean. It aims to scale up sustainable blue tourism by connecting science, policy and practice.

For a more detailed look at the methodology, maps, and recommendations, the full report is available here: Blue Tourism Initiative.

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