Human development in the Anthropocene: rethinking sustainability in a post COVID-19 Mediterranean

In little more than a decade, the global financial, climate, and inequality crises as well as the COVID-19 pandemic have clearly shown the inability of «business as usual» development models to tackle the challenges of current socio-ecological systems. Such unprecedented converging crises describe a tale of the risks we face as we go deeper into a new geological epoch described as the Anthropocene or the age of humans, characterised by a significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. According to a new report of the United Nations Development Programme [UNDP 2020], these impacts, interacting with ex isting socio-economic divide, threaten significant development reversals. Such awareness requires the need to redesign devel opment trajectories by fully accounting for the dangerous pres sures that humans put on the planet, in order to operate within a ‘just and safe space for humanity’, as new studies suggest. In such a scenario, the Mediterranean region emerges significantly, standing out as a socio-ecological system based on co-evolution and interaction between natural and human factors, but also as a human-designed system affected by the disproportionate influence and control of human factors over ecological elements and where multiple and complex environmental, social, political and economic determinants threaten sustainable development in all its dimensions (economic, social and environmental). The aim of the chapter is twofold. Firstly, given the complex and interdependent relationship between socio-economic and natural systems, it seeks to highlight the drivers and the impacts of the main environmental risks which affect the Mediterranean region; secondly, analysing the Planetary-Pressures Adjusted HDI – or PHDI, it aims to detect constraints and opportunities to ensure a fair and inclusive level of human development while reducing planetary pressures on both shores of the Mediterra nean. The chapter ends by providing some recommendations and lessons to be learned from current environmental and climate crises, highlighting the role of Euro-Mediterranean cooperation in tackling common challenges.