The Mediterranean has long been recognized as a climate hotspot, but the prevailing narrative often attributes its environmental fragility exclusively to global climate change. While climate dynamics are central, it is a mistake to overlook the equally powerful role of land-use and land-cover change. Historical processes of rural abandonment and coastal concentration of human activities have fundamentally altered the region’s water and energy balances, and with them, the very mechanisms that sustain rainfall.

The rural exodus of the mid-20th century was not simply a demographic shift; it was an ecological tipping point. Coastal urban and industrial expansion has degraded soils, intensified water extraction, and driven coastal “browning,” while the depopulated inland has undergone unmanaged forestation, increasing fire risk and altering the forest–water feedbacks that are essential to summer precipitation. These transformations, in combination with rising temperatures, have contributed to what several scholars described as a desertification feedback: a reorganization of the hydrological cycle in which evaporated moisture fails to precipitate inland, reinforcing drought, water scarcity, and climate vulnerability.

The implications are sobering. Declining topographic rainfall in the western Mediterranean has already been documented, threatening not only ecosystems but also the adaptive capacity of societies that depend on them. The challenge, therefore, is not merely to adapt to a warming climate but to actively intervene in land systems to break this destructive feedback.

Among the proposed solutions, forestry interventions stand out. Strategic afforestation and forest management could, in principle, re-couple the atmospheric and terrestrial components of the water cycle, increasing evapotranspiration and facilitating summer rainfall. This vision aligns with global precedents such as the rehabilitation of the Loess Plateau in China or the Great Green Wall initiative in Africa, both of which demonstrate the transformative potential of ecological interventions at scale.

Yet the evidence remains contested. Forests have been shown to both strengthen and weaken water availability, depending on context. The species planted, the density of trees, the structure of the forest, the soil, and the prevailing weather regime all shape outcomes. In Spain’s Mijares watershed, often studied as a pilot case, expanding woodland cover has coincided with declining summer rainfall—highlighting the complexity of land cover–atmosphere interactions and the risks of assuming linear cause–and–effect relationships.

This uncertainty should not be interpreted as grounds for inaction. Rather, it underscores the need for a nuanced, integrated approach to land management in the Mediterranean. Future forestry strategies must move beyond a singular focus on water provision and instead embrace multifunctionality: fire prevention, biodiversity conservation, soil protection, and the provision of ecosystem services alongside hydrological regulation. They must also be guided by rigorous research into local atmospheric dynamics, thresholds for storm formation, and the spatial and temporal scales at which interventions can meaningfully alter the water cycle.

Desertification in the western Mediterranean is not an inevitable outcome—but it will become one if land-use decisions continue to neglect their climatic consequences. Forests, abandoned lands, and coastal developments are not passive backdrops to climate change; they are active variables in its trajectory. To preserve the Mediterranean as a habitable, productive, and resilient region, bold interventions of sufficient scale and coherence are required. The choice before us is clear: either we design and implement strategies capable of breaking the desertification feedback, or we resign ourselves to a Mediterranean future defined by scarcity.