| The Ministry for Foreign Action and European Union of the Government of Catalonia and the European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMed), with the collaboration of the Alliance for Mediterranean Cooperation (MedCoopAlliance), are promoting the MedCat Days 2024 initiative, which will take place in Barcelona on 25 and 26 June 2024. Under the title “Fighting climate change in time of multiple crises in the Mediterranean”, MedCat Days 2024 provides a space for reflection, debate, actors’ workshops, Euro-Mediterranean initiatives and projects, and institutional meetings. Operating in crisis mode seems to have become the normal functioning modality in Euro-Mediterranean relations. Over the last few years, there has been a succession of crises of different natures and intensities, with one crisis succeeding and overlapping the next. Two years after the Covid pandemic started spreading across the globe, the Ukraine war erupted in 2022. Neither the global health crisis nor the armed conflict in Eastern Europe were limited in their effects to the Mediterranean. Yet, both events had a significant toll on the region. More significantly, the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 and the ensuing military operations of Israel in Gaza is likely to be a watershed moment for the region, although it is still too soon to figure out the full scale of the consequences. These crises have been preceded by or coincided with bilateral tensions between countries of the region that episodically turned into diplomatic crises, economic and political domestic crises in countries such as Lebanon or Tunisia, and the perception of a constant migration crisis by some countries of the region. These crises have impacted Euro-Mediterranean relations in many ways. They have at times paralysed or inhibited regional cooperation mechanisms and regional integration processes and generated renewed misunderstandings between partners. They have also challenged the efforts of those who have been tirelessly working to transform Euro-Mediterranean cooperation into an operational instrument to fight common and more structural crises such as climate change or economic and social justice in the Mediterranean. The current crisis in the Middle East will complicate the implementation of the New Agenda for the Mediterranean adopted in 2021 which has had the merit to pay renewed attention to issues such as the green transition or social and economic inclusiveness. This fourth edition of MedCat Days focuses more specifically on how these crises have affected the capacity of institutions to deal with a more permanent turmoil across the Mediterranean: climate emergency and water scarcity. Has the above-mentioned succession of crises shaken the notion of addressing climate change as a matter of absolute priority both for the EU and for its Mediterranean partners? Are arising misunderstandings between both sides of the Mediterranean challenging their common resolve to address the challenges related to climate change? |
Date and place
25-26 June – Barcelona
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