Mediterranean water shortages: Greedy tourists bring drought

ClimateChangeCorp: Countries bordering the Mediterranean are facing the prospect of water crises in coming years. Fuelling these crises are the 200 million sun-hungry travellers who visit the southern European region each year. Their number is expected to triple to 600 million by 2025, according to WWF. The campaign group warned about increased numbers of tourists contributing to drought in the region as early as 2004. In a report about the threat of expanding tourism on the Mediterranean’s water supplies, it observed that most resort tourists use “almost four times the daily water consumption of an average Spanish city dweller”.

Some resorts are trying to shed the “water waster” image. Cavo Sidero, a 6,000-acre, 7,000-bed resort planned for the north-eastern side of Crete, is being billed as the largest eco-friendly resort in the region, with construction scheduled to start this year. But the green tourism trend is far from widespread in the Mediterranean. Many of the area’s hotels claim they have adopted water-saving policies, but in practice these often amount to little more than asking guests to limit the number of towels they use, says Professor Murray Simpson at Oxford University’s Centre for the Environment…

The town of Hydra on Hydra island, Greece, photo by Herbert Ortner of Austria, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation license, Version 1.2