Tunisia will bring to Nice, from June 9 to 13, 2025, on the occasion of the third United Nations Conference on the Oceans (UNOC 3), a regional initiative of strategic importance: the creation of a Mediterranean alliance against elevation of sea level. This announcement comes while the most recent studies, carried out jointly with the World Bank, place Tunisia at the top of the Mediterranean countries phenomenon.
The Minister of the Environment, Habib Abid, said that some of the sixty Tunisian islands could lose up to 20 % of their area in the coming decades. The national coast, which extends over more than 1,300 kilometers, is also threatened by erosion and recurrent marine submersions. A vulnerability aggravated by uncontrolled urbanization and the degradation of natural ecosystems.
The alliance that Tunisia wishes to federate would be intended to pool expertise, to facilitate access to international funding, but also to encourage coordinated actions in the fields of coastal protection, the adaptation of infrastructures and the preservation of marine biodiversity. “It is no longer a question of ringing the alarm, but of building a concerted political and technical response,” said Habib Abid, at a conference organized in Tunis.
This active environmental diplomacy is accompanied by several concrete projects. A program to combat erosion is already underway, in partnership with Germany and the Netherlands, on the beaches of the North West to the Southeast. Tunisia also leads negotiations to convert part of its debt into climate investments, like the Tunisian-Italian project for the rehabilitation of treatment plants.
In September, a conference on climate investment, co-organized with UNDP, should allow Tunis to present a portfolio of “bancable” projects, in the fields of clean energy, waste management or resilience of coastal territories.
In a Mediterranean particularly exposed to warming, the Tunisian initiative could, if it leads, constitute a regional turning point, mixing climate diplomacy, South-South cooperation and shared responsibility. A geopolitical bet as much as an ecological emergency.
