YouthCARE4Planet in Tunisia: Youth and Communities Fighting Pollution and Building Resilience

In Gabès, southern Tunisia, years of environmental harm have sparked a new wave of collective action. In 2025, young people, local associations, and community organizers coordinated strikes, shared citizen reports, and forged new partnerships to demand accountability.

Publication Date
18/02/2026
Reading Time
4 minutes

This article is part of a series of stories that explore environmental challenges and youth initiatives in each country and region participating in YouthCARE4planet project in the Mediterranean.

A city holding its breath

In Gabes, a coastal city in southern Tunisia known for its fishing ports and palm groves, a warm autumn morning in 2025 is marked not by the usual hustle, but by a heavy, chemical odor drifting from the nearby industrial zone. The smell seeps into residential neighborhoods as children head to school and fishermen prepare their nets. By midday, the city center is unusually quiet—a general strike has brought daily life to a halt.

The banners read: “We want to breathe.” For residents, this is not metaphorical. Years of exposure to chemical emissions and industrial waste have made breathing a political act—and silence, complicity.

A long-awaited industrial revolution turned toxic

Gabes’ crisis is rooted in its economic history. Since the 1970s, the city has hosted large-scale phosphate processing and chemical production, anchored by the state-owned Tunisian Chemical Group. Phosphate rock is transformed into fertilizers for export, an industry long promoted as vital to national development.

But the environmental cost has been staggering. Liquid effluents discharged into the sea, airborne emissions from processing plants, and solid waste piled near residential areas have reshaped Gabes’ ecosystem.

What makes Gabes distinct is not only the scale of contamination, but its proximity. Chemical plants sit just meters away from homes, schools, and hospitals. For many residents, there is no buffer between industry and daily life, no place to retreat. 

Decades of proximity between industry and daily life have fuelled today’s citizen movement, transforming long-standing grievances into coordinated demands for accountability.

Climate change as a force multiplier

Climate change has intensified an already dire situation. Rising temperatures and prolonged heatwaves trap pollutants closer to the ground, worsening air quality and amplifying respiratory distress.

Changes in the Mediterranean are compounding the effects of industrial pollution, depleting fish stocks. Fishermen in Gabes report dwindling catches and species disappearance, losses that threaten both livelihoods and food security.

Indeed, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has classified the Gulf of Gabes among the world’s pollution hotspots , with multidimensional impact on water, air, and soil.

Health, livelihoods, and distrust

Health concerns dominate everyday conversations in Gabes. The European Union study highlights that exposure to the Chemical Group’s pollutants can cause asthma, osteoporosis and rare cancers found nowhere else in Tunisia. According to residents in Gabes, nearly every household has at least one member suffering from cancer. While activists demand transparent studies on disease rates in the region, many say the lack of clear, accessible data has fuelled mistrust toward authorities.

Economic dependence complicates resistance. For thousands of families, the chemical industry remains a primary source of employment. This creates a painful dilemma: protest the pollution that threatens your health, or defend the jobs that keep food on the table.

Years of unfulfilled promises, ranging from the relocation of industrial units to pollution controls and environmental remediation, have deepened public scepticism. What were once calls for reform have hardened into demands for immediate action, with residents now openly calling for the dismantling of the chemical group they hold responsible for decades of environmental harm.

Youth at the center of resistance

In 2025, youth emerged as the backbone of Gabes’ renewed mobilization, transforming long-standing grievances into sustained collective action.These community-led movements have organized protests, coordinated strike actions, and documented pollution through videos, testimonies, and citizen reporting shared widely online.

Alongside them, football ultras, youth groups traditionally associated with local clubs and stadium culture, have played an unexpected but decisive role. Drawing on their experience with street mobilization, chants, and visual symbolism, ultras helped energize demonstrations, enforce strike participation, and turn protests into powerful spectacles of collective defiance. Their presence blurred the line between sports culture and political activism, channelling frustration over unemployment, marginalization, and environmental harm into organized resistance.

Through documentation, online campaigning, and coordinated protests, youth activists helped raise awareness, collect community evidence, and build new partnerships across civil society.

A strike that resonated nationwide

Despite mounting pressure from the state and security forces, protests have continued with striking consistency since October 8 2025. The escalation peaked on October 21, when the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT) called a general strike that organizers said achieved full participation. On the same day, it is estimated that 130,000 people from all walks of life joined a mass march, an unprecedented turnout widely described as the largest mobilization in the governorate’s history.

Momentum extended beyond Gabes. On October 9, 18, and 26, hundreds of demonstrators marched on the national headquarters of the Groupe Chimique in central Tunis. The movement also reached beyond Tunisia’s borders: on October 26, members of the Tunisian diaspora staged a solidarity rally in Paris at Place de la République.

Pathways forward

For many in Gabes, gradual reforms are no longer seen as credible. After decades of stalled commitments, environmental upgrades that never materialized, monitoring mechanisms without consequences, and transition plans left on paper, residents are demanding decisive political action. Central among these demands is the dismantling of the chemical group, which residents accused of generating profits through a development model that has systematically undermined their dignity and their right to health and a safe environment.

What Gabes offers the world is not just a warning, but a lesson. The youth of Gabes are challenging that model, insisting that climate justice begins with the right to breathe. Beyond protest, these mobilizations have strengthened community networks and youth leadership, laying the groundwork for longer-term resilience and civic engagement.

As climate impacts intensify across North Africa, the question raised in this coastal city echoes far beyond Tunisia: who bears the cost of “development,” and who gets to decide what a liveable future looks like?

Last Update

18/02/2026