Mediterranean Italy Nature Nonprofits

Southern Italy and its islands are the deep Mediterranean: olive and citrus and dry stone, a coast of extraordinary beauty, and volcanoes, Etna, Vesuvius, Stromboli, that are among the most active in Europe and that have made the soils around them exceptionally fertile, which is why people keep living on their slopes despite everything.

The sea is the story. The Mediterranean is warming faster than the global ocean average, and tropical species are arriving through Suez while native ones retreat. The Posidonia meadows on the seabed, which are seagrass rather than seaweed and which can live for thousands of years, are among the most important carbon stores and fish nurseries in the basin, and they are being torn up by anchors and coastal works.

The organizations here protect the Posidonia and the marine reserves, defend the ancient olive groves of the south against a bacterial disease that has killed millions of trees in Puglia, and work on a coastline where illegal building and organised crime have long been part of the environmental problem.