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The Mediterranean coastal regions of Southern Europe have long been world leaders in mass tourism. This book examines some key questions for tourism development in these areas, with implications for similar regions across the world. The standardised forms of mass tourism are diversifying – with more specialised forms, notably those based on nature, culture and heritage, and those catering for special interests. There is a growing spectrum of modes of tourism, with an emphasis on variety, flexibility and permeability. Both mass tourism and the more diversified forms substantially impact on sustainable development. Policies promoting sustainable development are often of two main types: developing smaller-scale, alternative tourism products that are intended to be less damaging to the environment and society, and secondly, attempts to make mass tourism coastal resorts more sustainable. But there has been little critical assessment of these policies, either evaluating their basic assumptions or their successes and failures in practice. This edited book critically examines these issues for varied coastal regions in Southern Europe, including case studies from Spain, Croatia, Turkey, and north and south Cyprus.

The Mediterranean coastal regions of Southern Europe have long been world leaders in mass tourism. This book examines some key questions for tourism development in these areas, with implications for similar regions across the world. The standardised forms of mass tourism are diversifying – with more specialised forms, notably those based on nature, culture and heritage, and those catering for special interests. There is a growing spectrum of modes of tourism, with an emphasis on variety, flexibility and permeability. Both mass tourism and the more diversified forms substantially impact on sustainable development. Policies promoting sustainable development are often of two main types: developing smaller-scale, alternative tourism products that are intended to be less damaging to the environment and society, and secondly, attempts to make mass tourism coastal resorts more sustainable. But there has been little critical assessment of these policies, either evaluating their basic assumptions or their successes and failures in practice. This edited book critically examines these issues for varied coastal regions in Southern Europe, including case studies from Spain, Croatia, Turkey, and north and south Cyprus.

Environmental activists and academics alike are realizing that a sustainable society must be a just one. Environmental degradation is almost always linked to questions of human equality and quality of life. Throughout the world, those segments of the population that have the least political power and are the most marginalized are selectively victimized by environmental crises. This book argues that social and environmental justice within and between nations should be an integral part of the policies and agreements that promote sustainable development. The book addresses the links between environmental quality and human equality and between sustainability and environmental justice.

The present study illustrates a multidimensional analysis of an indicator of urban land use efficiency (per-capita built-up area, LUE) in mainland Attica, a Mediterranean urban region, along different expansion waves (1960–2010): compaction and densification in the 1960s, dispersed growth along the coasts and on Athens’ fringe in the 1970s, fringe consolidation in the 1980s, moderate re-polarization and discontinuous expansion in the 1990s and sprawl in remote areas in the 2000s. The non-linear trend in LUE (a continuous increase up to the 1980s and a moderate decrease in 1990 and 2000 preceding the rise observed over the last decade) reflects Athens’ expansion waves. A total of 23 indicators were collected by decade for each municipality of the study area with the aim of identifying the drivers of land use efficiency. In 1960, municipalities with low efficiency in the use of land were concentrated on both coastal areas and Athens’ fringe, while in 2010, the lowest efficiency rate was observed in the most remote, rural areas. Typical urban functions (e.g., mixed land uses, multiple-use buildings, vertical profile) are the variables most associated with high efficiency in the use of land. Policies for sustainable land management should consider local and regional factors shaping land use efficiency promoting self-contained expansion and more tightly protecting rural and remote land from dispersed urbanization. LUE is a promising indicator reflecting the increased complexity of growth patterns and may anticipate future urban trends.

Significance Adaptive governance (AG) has been suggested as a suitable approach for ecosystem management in changing environments. It rests on the assumption that landscapes and seascapes need to be understood and governed as complex social–ecological systems rather than as ecosystems alone. We compared three AG initiatives and their effects on natural capital and ecosystem services. In comparison with other efforts aimed at conservation and sustainable use of natural capital, adaptive governance developed capacity to manage multiple ecosystem services and respond to ecosystem-wide changes and enabled collaboration across diverse interests, sectors, and institutional arrangements. Internal and external pressures continuously challenge the adaptive capacity of the initiatives. To gain insights into the effects of adaptive governance on natural capital, we compare three well-studied initiatives; a landscape in Southern Sweden, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and fisheries in the Southern Ocean. We assess changes in natural capital and ecosystem services related to these social–ecological governance approaches to ecosystem management and investigate their capacity to respond to change and new challenges. The adaptive governance initiatives are compared with other efforts aimed at conservation and sustainable use of natural capital: Natura 2000 in Europe, lobster fisheries in the Gulf of Maine, North America, and fisheries in Europe. In contrast to these efforts, we found that the adaptive governance cases developed capacity to perform ecosystem management, manage multiple ecosystem services, and monitor, communicate, and respond to ecosystem-wide changes at landscape and seascape levels with visible effects on natural capital. They enabled actors to collaborate across diverse interests, sectors, and institutional arrangements and detect opportunities and problems as they developed while nurturing adaptive capacity to deal with them. They all spanned local to international levels of decision making, thus representing multilevel governance systems for managing natural capital. As with any governance system, internal changes and external drivers of global impacts and demands will continue to challenge the long-term success of such initiatives.

The study analysed 93 samples from four Serbian clay deposits to determine their suitability for ceramics production. The samples were mainly composed of illite and kaolinite. Ternary diagrams were used to classify the samples and evaluate their applicability. Winkler's diagrams, ternary graphs and mineralogical compositions were analysed. The results showed a broader area in these graphs than previously determined for structural ceramics, as well as the potential of these clays for ceramic production. The study used dry-milled, hydraulically semi-dry, pressed and fired samples to assess water absorption and flexural strength and statistical analysis to determine the key parameters influencing final product quality, including that of refractory, wall and floor tiles. This paper evaluates the raw clay materials' applicability in ceramic production, promoting sustainable use through rapid initial tests, energy savings through dry milling and ecologically sound principles through resource-efficient evaluation.

Over the past few decades, notions of environmental, ecological or green gentrification in cities have entered the lexicon of critical urban scholars and activists alike, not least in North American and European settings. This happens amidst growing concerns that the current policy and planning emphasis on making cities more sustainable serves in some cases to exacerbate sociomaterial inequalities in the city via forms of residential displacement. In this critical commentary, I respond to recent calls for expanding the socio-geographical parameters of green gentrification research, and for enriching the agenda via new theoretical approaches, by highlighting one particular avenue of problematisation that seems so far conspicuously lacking. This is the realisation that, in an unequal world of anthropogenic climate change, green gentrification must be grasped not only at local but also, simultaneously, at transnational scales of risk-induced socio-spatial restructuring. My suggested approach to a more multi-scalar and climate-sensitive notion of green gentrification proceeds via sociologist Ulrich Beck’s theorising of the intensifying socio-material inequalities of climate change in ‘world risk society’, along with ethnographic work on urban climate politics in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, and in the North-West Indian city of Surat. While allowing us to analyse the many local ambivalences wedded with urban sustainability politics in the global North and global South alike, Beck helpfully insists that we keep their unequal trans-local interconnectedness in view, yielding a radicalised notion of green gentrification as set in-between and connecting localised and globalised frames of inequality in new ways. 在过去的几十年里，城市的环境、生态或绿色绅士化的概念已经成为了城市批判学者和城市活动家的常用术语，在北美和欧洲尤其如此。其背景是，越来越多的人担心当前强调提高城市可持续性的政策和规划在某些情况下会通过各种形式的居民驱逐加剧城市的社会物质不平等。在这篇批判性的评论中，我强调迄今为止明显缺乏的一种特殊的问题化途径，从而回应了最近关于扩展绿色绅士化研究的社会地理参数、以及通过新的理论方法丰富议程的呼吁。这是一种认识，即在一个不平等的人为气候变化世界中，绿色绅士化不仅必须在地方尺度把握，同时也必须在引发风险的社会空间重组的跨国尺度上把握。我建议以一种更为多尺度、且对气候敏感的方式看待绿色绅士化概念，这一灵感的来源是社会学家乌尔里希·贝克 (Ulrich Beck) 关于“世界风险社会”中不断加剧的气候变化社会物质不平等的理论，以及丹麦首都哥本哈根和印度西北部城市苏拉特的城市气候政治的人类学研究。贝克使我们能分析全球北方和全球南方伴随城市可持续发展政治而来的许多地方矛盾心理，同时他有益地坚持认为，我们应该考虑它们不平等的跨地方相互联系，正是这种联系产生了一种介于两者之间的激进的绿色绅士化概念，并以新的方式将地方和全球不平等框架联系起来。

Climate warming, agricultural intensity, and urban growth are main forces triggering land degradation in advanced economies. Being active over different spatial and temporal scales, they usually reflect—at least indirectly—the impact of additional factors, such as wellbeing, demographic dynamics, and social development, on land quality. Using descriptive statistics and a multiple regression analysis, we analyzed the impact of these three processes comparatively over a decadal scale from 1960 to 2020 at the provincial level (Nuts-3 sensu Eurostat) in Italy. We enriched the investigation with a short-term forecast for 2030, based on four simplified assumptions grounded on a purely deterministic approach. Land degradation was estimated adopting the Environmental Sensitive Area Index (ESAI) measured at the spatio-temporal scale mentioned above. Computing on multiple observations at nearly 300,000 locations all over Italy, provinces were regarded as representative spatial units of the territorial pattern of land degradation. Between 1960 and 1990, the three predictors (climate, agriculture, and urbanization) explained a relatively high proportion of variance, suggesting a modest role for any other (unobserved) factor. All of these factors were found to be highly significant predictors of land degradation intensity across provinces, the most impactful being farming intensity. The highest adjusted-R2 coefficient was observed in both 1990 and 2000, and suggests that the three predictors still reflect the most powerful drivers of land degradation in Italy at those times, with a marginal role for additional (unobserved) factors. The impact of farming intensity remained high, with the role of urbanization increasing moderately, and the role of climate aridity declining weakly between 2000 and 2010. In more recent times (2010 and 2020), and in future (2030) scenarios, the adjusted R2 diminished moderately, suggesting a non-negligible importance of external (unobserved) factors and the rising role of spatial heterogeneity. The climate factor became progressively insignificant over time, while increasing the role of urbanization systematically. The impact of farming intensity remained high and significant. These results underlie a latent shift in the spatial distribution of the level of land vulnerability in Italy toward a spatially polarized model, influenced primarily by human pressure and socioeconomic drivers and less intensively shaped by biophysical factors. Climate aridity was revealed to be more effective in the explanation of land degradation patterns in the 1960s rather than in recent observation times.

Land degradation is more evident where conditions of environmental vulnerability already exist because of arid climate and unsustainable forms of land exploitation. Consequently, semi-arid and dry areas have been identified as vulnerable land, requiring attention from both science and policy perspectives. In some regions, such as the Mediterranean region, land degradation is particularly intense, although there are no extreme ecological conditions. In these contexts, a wide range of formal and informal responses is necessary to face particularly complex and spatially differentiated territorial processes. However, the fit of responses has been demonstrated to be different over time and space according to the underlying socioeconomic context and the specific ecological conditions. The present commentary discusses this sort of “entropy” in the policy response to land degradation in Southern Europe, outlining the intrinsic complexity of human–nature dynamics at the base of such processes. Reflecting the need of differentiated regional strategies and more specific national measures to combat desertification, three policy frameworks (agro-environmental, economic, social) with an indirect impact on fighting land degradation have been considered, delineating the importance of policy assemblages. Finally, the importance of policy impact assessment methodologies was highlighted, focusing on the possible responses reinforcing a continental strategy against land degradation. By evidencing the role of participatory planning, developmental policies indirectly addressing land degradation reveal to be an important vector of more specific measures abating desertification risk, creating, in turn, a favorable context for direct interventions of mitigation or adaptation to climate change.