Editorial

Aspiration and Structure in Mediterranean Sustainability

Abstract

Sustainability in the Mediterranean is rarely held back by a shortage of stated ambition, and the region now possesses an abundance of strategies, targets, and declarations addressed to its overlapping environmental, economic, and social pressures. What it possesses in far smaller measure is the productive, institutional, and behavioral apparatus through which such ambition becomes ordinary practice, and it is precisely this distance between what is declared and what is structurally feasible that the contributions gathered in the present issue examine from several directions at once. The region continues to warm faster than the global mean and to absorb pressures from energy demand, demographic change, migratory flows, and a deep dependence on tourism, and these conditions interact in ways that resist sectoral treatment and reward integrated analysis (Salvati and Vardopoulos, 2024; Vardopoulos et al., 2024). Read together, the studies and the data paper assembled herewith suggest that the unfinished business of the regional transition lies less in the formulation of goals than in the slow reconfiguration of the structures, the systems of measurement, and the everyday choices on which any durable transformation depends.