The Gulf of Gabès: A Nation Confronts Its Environmental Legacy

The Gulf of Gabès was once called a maritime oasis. This stretch of Tunisia’s southeastern coast, where shallow turquoise waters meet North Africa’s largest remaining date palm groves, supported fishing communities for millennia. Posidonia seagrass meadows carpeted the seafloor, sheltering juvenile fish and sequestering carbon. The ecosystem’s productivity made it legendary among Mediterranean fishers.

For the past fifty years, that ecosystem has absorbed the byproducts of Tunisia’s phosphate industry. The cumulative toll has been immense. But 2025 marked a turning point: the year when citizens drew a line, when protests paralyzed the city, and when the highest levels of government finally responded with language that validated what activists had long claimed.

The Gulf of Gabès is becoming a test case for environmental accountability in the Mediterranean.

The Weight of Decades

Tunisia sits atop some of the world’s largest phosphate deposits. Mining operations in the interior, centered around Gafsa, extract raw phosphate rock that is then transported to coastal facilities for processing into phosphoric acid and fertilizers. The Tunisian Chemical Group, a state-owned enterprise, operates the primary processing complex in Gabès.

The industrial process generates phosphogypsum as a byproduct: a slite slurry containing trace radioactive elements, heavy metals, and high acidity. For decades, this material has been discharged directly into the sea. The discharge created what marine scientists describe as a dead zone extending several kilometers offshore. Posidonia meadows that once defined the Gulf’s ecology have been decimated across vast areas. Toxins have accumulated in the food web, working their way through fish populations and into the communities that depend on them.

For residents of Gabès, the pollution has never been abstract. Air quality in neighborhoods near the industrial complex is chronically poor. The smell of chemical processing permeates daily life. Health concerns have mounted over years, though comprehensive epidemiological data has historically been difficult to obtain.

The 2025 Crisis

Tensions that had simmered for years boiled over in the fall of 2025.

A summer of intense heatwaves exacerbated the dispersion of industrial fumes across residential areas. Then, in October, a series of severe gas leaks occurred at the facility. Ammonia and nitrous oxide releases sent dozens of residents to hospitals, including schoolchildren who suffered respiratory distress and symptoms of asphyxiation. Images of children receiving oxygen treatment circulated widely on social media.

The public response was immediate and unprecedented in scale. A coalition of civil society groups, supported by the Tunisian General Labor Union, declared a general strike on October 21, 2025. The city shut down. Thousands marched under banners reading “Gabès Wants to Live” (Gabès veut vivre), demanding not apologies but action: cessation of the pollution and relocation of the most dangerous industrial units away from residential areas and the coast.

The protests marked a shift in how environmental grievances were articulated. Previous demonstrations had often focused on economic concerns, framing pollution as a price communities paid for jobs. The 2025 movement reframed the issue in existential terms. Signs spoke of health and survival, not trade-offs. The social license that had allowed industrial operations to continue despite known harms had, in the view of many residents, finally expired.

Presidential Response

On January 14, 2026, President Kais Saied convened a meeting with a specially appointed task force comprising petrochemical engineers, medical experts, and former directors of the chemical group. The session produced language that surprised observers accustomed to governmental caution on industrial policy.

President Saied described the situation in Gabès as an “environmental assassination.” The term, stark and unequivocal, aligned the state’s official position with claims that activists had made for years. It acknowledged that what had occurred was not merely unfortunate but constituted a fundamental violation of citizens’ rights to health and a livable environment.

The task force presented recommendations spanning immediate repairs and longer-term structural changes. Emergency funds were mobilized to repair leaking valves and failing filtration systems that had caused the October gas releases. The government committed to the long-delayed project of relocating pollutant-heavy units away from residential neighborhoods and the coastline. A review of management practices that allowed the facility to deteriorate was initiated.

Whether these commitments translate into sustained action remains to be seen. Phosphate is a major export, and the economic interests supporting continued production are substantial. But the January 2026 intervention represents a rhetorical and political shift: the state has named the problem in terms that make continued inaction harder to justify.

Restoration Beneath the Surface

While political battles unfold onshore, conservation efforts continue underwater.

The degradation caused by industrial discharge has been compounded by “ghost gear”: fishing nets lost or abandoned over decades of intensive fishing activity. These nets, manufactured from synthetic nylon, persist in the marine environment for generations. They continue catching fish, turtles, and dolphins long after fishers have forgotten them, a phenomenon scientists call ghost fishing. Draped across damaged seabeds and snagged on remnant Posidonia formations, they represent both ecological harm and physical obstacles to recovery.

International and local partnerships intensified removal operations throughout 2025. The Strong Sea LIFE project and the GhostNets initiative coordinated diving teams to manually locate, cut, and retrieve abandoned gear from the seafloor. In one operation spanning waters off Monastir and the deeper Gulf, teams removed nearly three tons of ghost nets, clearing over 52,000 square meters of seabed.

The work is painstaking. Divers must assess each net’s entanglement with bottom structures before cutting, avoiding further damage to whatever marine life or habitat remains. Priority goes to areas where nets have snagged on surviving Posidonia, since the seagrass represents the ecosystem’s best hope for natural regeneration if given the chance to recover.

Retrieved nets have found unexpected second lives. The Association for the Protection of the Environment of Kelibia launched “Nets of Hope,” a project that processes salvaged gear into recycled materials for consumer products. The circular economy dimension adds value to cleanup operations, transforming liability into resource.

New Pressures, New Questions

The Gulf’s future involves more than resolving its industrial past. New development projects introduce additional variables into an already stressed system.

North of Gabès, the Hicha II project represents a different kind of coastal industrialization. Developed by a Dutch agricultural company, the project involves construction of fifty hectares of high-tech glass greenhouses for tomato production aimed at export markets. The facility will operate its own desalination plant, drawing seawater through a 3.5-kilometer intake pipe and discharging concentrated brine through a 2.5-kilometer outfall.

Desalination brine is not toxic in the conventional sense, but its elevated salinity can create localized conditions that stress marine organisms adapted to normal seawater. In a gulf already characterized by high temperatures and compromised ecosystems, the cumulative effect of additional stressors requires careful monitoring. The project illustrates tensions that coastal communities increasingly face: economic development promising jobs and foreign investment arrives alongside environmental loads that compound existing damage.

How Tunisia navigates these competing pressures will shape not just the Gulf of Gabès but serve as precedent for coastal development decisions across the region.

The Long Horizon

Environmental restoration operates on timescales that can seem impossibly distant from political cycles. One Tunisian expert cited in regional media suggested that full ecosystem recovery in the Gulf might require 150 years, assuming pollution sources are controlled and active restoration efforts continue. Such projections humble anyone hoping for quick redemption.

Yet the alternative to long-term commitment is abandonment, and Gabès is not a place that can be abandoned. Hundreds of thousands of people live along these shores. Fishing communities trace their presence back centuries. The phosphate industry, for all its environmental costs, employs thousands and generates revenue the national economy depends upon. The challenge is not choosing between industry and environment but transforming both.

The ghost net divers surfacing with loads of tangled nylon, the protesters who shut down their city to demand breathable air, the president who named what had occurred as assassination rather than accident: each represents a different kind of intervention in a story that will unfold across generations. The Gulf of Gabès is damaged profoundly. It is also, perhaps for the first time, receiving the attention and resources that recovery requires.

Whether that proves sufficient remains the open question. The Mediterranean has witnessed civilizations rise and fall along its shores, ecosystems transformed by human activity across millennia. The Gulf of Gabès adds another chapter to that long history: a place where the costs of industrialization became impossible to ignore, and where a nation began the slow, uncertain work of making amends.

Written by: Junior Thanong Aiamkhophueng

Attribution: This article draws on reporting from People’s Dispatch and Middle East Report on the 2025 Gabès environmental crisis; Inkyfada investigative coverage of the Groupe Chimique Tunisien; allAfrica reporting on the January 2026 presidential task force; technical documentation from SPA/RAC and the Strong Sea LIFE project on ghost gear removal and marine restoration; and regional analysis from Noria Research. UGTT protest photo via People’s Dispatch; Gulf of Gabès satellite image by NASA Johnson via Wikimedia Commons. For further reading, visit Inkyfada, MERIP, and France 24.