Environment

The Mediterranean Sea has become the sentinel of the climate crisis

An interactive exhibition in Palermo recounts the changing eco-systemic of the mare nostrum

by Mauro Garofalo

11 January 2026

I residui di fosfati vengono scaricati in mare, causando l’inquinamento della fascia costiera e gravi problemi ambientali. Gabès, Tunisia, 2023.

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Key points

Liberti: "Any global imbalance becomes immediately visible here"
Bellina: "Common history and culture"
What will it be like in 2050?

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Saffron, turmeric, red and yellow at the market in Gabès, the Tunisian city by the sea whose inhabitants are becoming climate migrants to Europe. Rising water levels (as far as the Kerkennah islands) are forcing them to leave everything behind. The Mediterranean Sea, the ancient cradle of civilisation, is now a 'climate sentinel': alien fish, the Mar Menor in Spain (Europe's largest salt lagoon was granted legal personality after an eco-systemic collapse, and thanks to the efforts of a popular movement).

Liberti: 'Any global imbalance becomes immediately visible here'

"Hotspot Mediterraneo" is the first major interactive exhibition - photos, video and audio - on the eco-systemic change that is happening to the mare nostrum. The exhibition, conceived by documentary photographer Francesco Bellina and environmental journalist-writer Stefano Liberti, is free of charge and can be visited at the Eco-museum of the sea in Palermo, until 1 February 2026.

"The Mediterranean Sea is a sentinel of climate," says Liberti, "because it records everything first, and does so in an amplified way. It is a shallow sea compared to the oceans, with limited exchanges: this makes it extremely sensitive to variations in temperature, salinity, winds, river inputs. Any global imbalance here becomes immediately local, visible, and therefore narratable'.

This is what the exhibition's creators have attempted to do: 'To narrate a crisis as it unfolds, as the prism of a global crisis. The Mediterranean is a semi-enclosed sea,' the journalist continues, 'inhabited, crossed, exploited. It is a sea between lands. Around the basin live 500 million people. We have tried to give voice to this sea through our view of fishermen, scientists, activists'.

Come sta cambiando il Mediterraneo
Photogallery10 foto

Bellina: "Common history and culture"

Along the interactive route, faces, places, horizons parade: "We have to think of the Mediterranean as an ecosystem linked by a common history and culture," says Bellina. "Within this ensemble, we can see areas where we already seem to be in a post-apocalyptic phase, for example the beach of Gabès where the Groupe Chimique Tunisien - Gct - is located: a beach where you can't breathe because of the bad smell, full of turtle carcasses and dead fish. On the other hand, we see areas that are still in time to recover: I'm thinking of Mazara and Trapani, fishing in crisis and the presence of blue crabs and Caretta Caretta turtles'.

What will it be like in 2050?

Exhibitions such as 'Hotspot Mediterraneo' collect moments of the present so as to project them into the near future of humanity: 'In 2050, Mediterranean territories (are) territories of "forced adaptation",' Liberti imagines. 'Agriculture has shifted and transformed: new products are cultivated, others abandoned. Fishing has discovered new species. The landscape remains beautiful but harsher, less forgiving. The Mediterranean has tropicalised. It is a 'climatic gymnasium' where new coexistences between heat, scarcity, extreme events and everyday life are being experimented with'.

And what about humanity?, we ask the writer: 'Let's imagine a Mediterranean community that has become self-aware and has made adaptation and care an existential figure. The great climate crisis that has found a hotspot in the Mediterranean (understood as a basin of sea and land surrounding it) has been the fuse for finding a new unity of purpose, for living together, a new care for the environment and a new connection between human beings and eco-systems that have been neglected for too long'.

In spite of Artificial Intelligence, Bellina reflects: 'Photography is (still) perceived as the most objective medium to tell the facts. Although I am convinced of the opposite, i.e. that photography is always a subjective point of view, I believe that its immediacy, and sometimes its irony, are fundamental to the popularisation of the subject - and, he concludes, 'the great challenge is to keep a curated archive over the decades (of sorts) of the "visual agenda" of climate change'. Information on the exhibition on the Ecomuseum. website