Culture, Heritage, and Crisis in the Mediterranean: Collective Action for Peace and Sustainability
30 September 2025 | Conference | English | Spanish | Catalan | Institut d'Estudis Catalans (Barcelona)
The Mediterranean, a crossroads of cultures and traditions, faces growing threats to its tangible and intangible heritage due to climate change, instability, social tensions, and displacement. These risks endanger cultural diversity and its potential to foster inclusion and dialogue. To address this, the IEMed and the Anna Lindh Foundation (ALF), with EU DG MENA support, are co-organising a high-level MONDIACULT side event within the exhibition Mediterranean Heritage at the IEC in Barcelona. Bringing together experts, civil society, and institutions, the initiative promotes heritage as a driver of peacebuilding, cooperation, and sustainable Euro-Mediterranean dialogue.
The Mediterranean region stands as one of the world’s richest cultural melting pots, home to diverse civilisations, religious traditions, languages, and social practices. Its tangible and intangible heritage has shaped identities and catalysed dialogue and cooperation among and within societies.
Today, this extraordinary cultural richness is increasingly under strain. The accelerating effects of climate change, persistent political instability, rising social tensions, and forced displacement are placing heritage, the diversity of cultural expressions, and the cultural rights of the societies that sustain them at considerable risk. These challenges threaten the preservation of the Mediterranean’s diverse cultural heritage and undermine its potential to serve as a foundation for inclusion, dialogue, and cohesion.
Recognising the critical importance of safeguarding and promoting heritage, a high-level side event of MONDIACULT will bring together heritage experts, civil society leaders, cultural practitioners, and institutional representatives to engage in strategic reflection on the future of Mediterranean heritage. The event takes inspiration from the notion of heritage as a driver of inclusive and intergenerational development, intercultural dialogue, and sustainable international and local cooperation across the region. It also contributes to connecting MONDIACULT reflections to the policies supporting enlarged dialogue and collaboration in the Euro-Mediterranean region, starting from the upcoming New Pact for the Mediterranean.
To enrich the MONDIACULT 2025 focus on the role of cultural heritage in crisis contexts and peacebuilding, IEMed and ALF are collaborating with MF-CSIC and Heritage for Peace. On 1 October, MF-CSIC and Heritage for Peace are organising the conference ‘From crisis to commitment: rethinking policies and partnerships for heritage protection in conflicts and peacebuilding’ at IMF-CSIC in Barcelona.
These events will provide a space for heritage representatives from European and Mediterranean institutions, civil society, international experts, academics, EU representatives and UNESCO ambassadors to exchange ideas on MONDIACULT 2025.
A renewed chance to explore the exhibition ‘A Sea of Heritages’
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