Digital Twins as Technical Infrastructure for Euro-Mediterranean Cooperation

Digital Twins as Technical Infrastructure for Euro-Mediterranean Cooperation

From declarations to operational alignment

Author: Sebastiano Martignano, research strategy advisor -CRF Italy

 Abstract

The Euro-Mediterranean region is facing a critical juncture. Climate volatility, resource pressures, and infrastructure asymmetries are accelerating, while cooperation frameworks remain largely fragmented or symbolic. Despite decades of dialogue and investment, many joint initiatives have failed to produce lasting technical alignment, especially in areas where concrete coordination is most needed: energy, water, logistics, and circular economy systems.

Digital Twins offer a unique opportunity to reshape cooperation, moving beyond abstract policy frameworks into real, functioning systems. They allow distributed actors across the Mediterranean—municipalities, industrial clusters, research hubs—to simulate, optimize, and exchange models of reality, without requiring centralization or standardization of everything. In this sense, the Digital Twin is not just a digital replica of a system. It is a shared technical grammar through which diverse systems can speak, learn, and adapt together.

From fragmented projects to a cooperative infrastructure

Most cooperation programs operate through time-limited projects, with fixed deliverables and rigid structures. These often struggle to produce systemic change or continuity. Once the funding ends, so does the collaboration. Digital Twins enable a shift in paradigm: from isolated efforts to a living infrastructure, where systems are continuously modeled, scenarios shared, and mutual understanding built over time.

This approach is particularly relevant in the Mediterranean, where technical capacities are uneven, and operational conditions vary dramatically. Instead of enforcing uniformity, the Digital Twin enables diverse systems to cooperate on their own terms, using a shared logic to align where it matters—on flows, feedbacks, and outcomes.

A federated system of real-world cooperation

This initiative does not propose to harmonize policies or replicate technologies. It proposes to connect existing systems, each embedded in its own reality, into a wider federation. Greenhouses in North Africa, water systems in Southern Europe, waste recovery hubs in port cities—each can become a node in a distributed structure that mirrors how the Mediterranean already works: through movement, exchange, and negotiated interdependence.

Each node contributes what it can: a model of a process, a dataset, a policy simulation, a risk scenario. Together, these elements form a collective intelligence that can support decisions, test interventions, and coordinate actions in a way that no single actor could achieve alone.

The Digital Twin as a tool for resilience

In an age of cascading crises—climate events, supply chain disruptions, infrastructure failures—the ability to simulate, adapt, and coordinate across regions is vital. Yet traditional systems are siloed, slow, and reactive. A shared digital infrastructure enables real-time awareness and foresight, grounded in the actual systems that sustain life and economy across the region.

By anchoring cooperation in the logic of mutual modeling—rather than mutual reporting—the Digital Twin provides a space where decisions can be tested, aligned, and improved collaboratively. Not because everyone shares the same structure, but because everyone participates in the same process of understanding and response.

The Mediterranean, Federated by Infrastructure

To transform Euro-Mediterranean cooperation into a tangible and enduring reality, we must approach it as an engineering and operational challenge. A federated network of Digital Twins provides exactly this: not a centralized system imposed from above, but a shared infrastructure—built from the ground up, aligned through practical needs, and capable of evolving through continuous interaction.

It is through this form of technically grounded cooperation that the Mediterranean can become not just a geographic space, but a space of collective operational intelligence.

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