The nexus between human development and fishing footprint among mediterranean countries

Abstract

The last decades have shown that human activities damaged environmental quality and biodiversity. As accepted the need of sustainable development, there should be balance between economic, social and environmental issues in the long term. Ecological footprint is an important indicator that shows how human activities reduce environmental quality among a specific region or country. In addition, human capital is mostly used indicator to estimate economic and environmental development level. In this study, it is aimed to explore the effect of human capital on fishing footprint for 10 Mediterranean Countries during the period 1995-2018. According to empirical evidences, it is concluded that for relatively low human capital level, human capital has negative effect on sustainability and in the relatively high level, it has positive effect on sustainability.