Popularity burdens world's favorite coastline

But environmentalists see the spread of coastal development as an even more serious threat.

"As more and more of the coastline is covered in concrete, you have more flooding and worse water pollution in the adjacent sea," says Michael Scoullos, an environmental chemist at the University of Athens who heads a coalition of Mediterranean environmental groups. If resorts aren't planned well – and many are not – then more tourists means more pollution, he adds.

Tourism is a major industry in much of the Mediterranean, providing jobs and income for islands and remote coastal areas with limited alternatives. But poorly planned tourism developments can do economic harm as well.

"Basically, tourists are looking for clean beaches, nice landscapes, and pleasant sea bottoms," says Paolo Lombardi, director of the World Wide Fund for Nature's Rome-based Mediterranean program.

"If you overexploit an area, the well-heeled tourists go away and you start getting package tours, with less and less income generated," Mr. Lombardi says, noting that the majority of the money spent by the average package tourist never leaves northern Europe, winding up in the hands of travel agents and foreign resort owners.

The view from many of Corfu's eyesore high-rise hotels hints at what the island must have looked like a century ago.

Albania's mountainous coastline is visible across a few miles of water, its sloping shores still covered in trees. While Corfu thumps to the rhythms of its many discos, the Albanian shore is quiet. A narrow road links a few simple farming villages with Saranda, a sleepy, dilapidated town with big tourism aspirations.

"You can see there's not as much happening as in Corfu," Saranda tour guide Vasil Barka says wistfully as tourists gawk at one of the countless dome-shaped bunkers built by Albania's communist regime. "But we have big plans for the future."

In places like Saranda, sustainable environment and sustainable tourism could go hand in hand, but it requires careful planning, says Mr. Chabason of UNEP. Most new development will take place in poorer countries like Albania, Tunisia, and Turkey. Those locales don't have the money and expertise to identify and protect ecologically important areas like wetlands or seabird nesting sites, or to put effective zoning laws in place.

International cooperation, he argues, is essential to protecting what's left of the coast and the marine life that depends on it. But that's not so easy.

Since 1975, the 20 countries of the region have been working together to reduce oil spills and build new wastewater-treatment plants through UNEP's Mediterranean Action Program. In the past 10 years, the proportion of the region's wastewater that's treated has increased from a third to a half, and oil spills are less frequent.

But cooperation tends to stop at the water's edge. "Unfortunately, when it comes to coastal development, there are no regional protocols, conventions, and agreements. It's considered a national issue," Chabason says. "In most countries, the tourism industry is very powerful and there's very little [the international community] can do."

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