This study examines changes in old-age mortality in Europe during the COVID-19 pandemic period, focusing on two critical disparities: the East-West mortality gap and the gender mortality gap. Motivated by long-term variations in mortality rates across European regions and between sexes, this research aims to clarify how these inequalities changed during the pandemic. By addressing the interplay between regional and gender-based disparities, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of the pandemic's effects on vulnerable populations, particularly the elderly. Factor and cluster analyses were employed to categorise European countries into clusters for comparison of mortality trends and to evaluate the persistence of the East-West gradient. The research on mortality gaps utilises a quantitative approach, analysing data from the Human Mortality Database and Eurostat for the years 2019-2022. Annual weighted and unweighted mean differences in life expectancy at age 65 were calculated to assess changes during the pandemic. Gender-specific differences were examined alongside regional disparities to highlight the compounded impacts of the pandemic on old-age populations. The study reveals that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the East-West mortality gap among the elderly widened. Before the pandemic, the life expectancy difference at age 65 between Eastern and Western Europe was 4.44 years for men and 3.24 years for women. By 2022, this gap widened to 6.02 years for men and 4.75 years for women. Western European countries showed signs of recovery in 2022, whereas Eastern European countries experienced prolonged declines in life expectancy. Gender disparities remained relatively stable during the pandemic, with differences of approximately 4.4 years in Eastern Europe and 3.2 years in Western Europe. The findings underscore the pandemic's role in amplifying regional inequalities while maintaining gender disparities. This study provides novel insights into the compounded impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on old-age mortality in Europe, emphasising the interplay between regional and gender gaps. It contributes to the literature by demonstrating how crises, such as pandemics, can exacerbate existing inequalities. The findings have significant implications for public health policies, highlighting the need for targeted interventions to address regional disparities and support ageing populations in vulnerable regions.
This paper examines how environmental degradation, geopolitical competition, and governance failure intersect to shape political instability in Burkina Faso. Once considered a relatively stable democracy in West Africa, Burkina Faso has undergone two coups since 2022 amid mounting social and environmental crises. Using the Modelling Dense Urban Networks (MDUN) analytical tool, this study identifies the sociocultural, economic, and political dimensions of vulnerability that preceded these events. MDUN's multidimensional analysis demonstrates how public sentiment particularly declining confidence in government, growing xenophobia, and demands for national sovereignty crossed critical thresholds months before the second coup. These dynamics were shaped by worsening environmental stressors, including land degradation, resource competition, and declining agricultural productivity. The analysis situates Burkina Faso's experience within a broader theoretical framework linking environmental security and political ecology. It underscores how global and local forces converge in multi-scalar ways foreign mining interests, regional insurgencies, and global rivalries between France, Russia, and China all of which influence domestic legitimacy and governance. Environmental scarcity and political marginalization reinforce one another, eroding state capacity and fuelling public discontent. Findings suggest that societal vulnerability in Burkina Faso is best understood as a dialectical process: environmental stress undermines governance, weak governance deepens vulnerability, and both are shaped by internal and external actors seeking strategic advantage. Addressing instability in the Sahel requires more than counterterrorism or aid. It requires integrated approaches that strengthen environmental management, equitable access to resources, and political legitimacy at multiple scales. By combining environmental security theory with a structured vulnerability assessment, this study offers a framework for anticipating and interpreting sociopolitical instability in environmentally stressed regions.
The study responds to the paradigm shift that is taking place within the concept of sustainable tourism development. The so-called "regenerative shift" moves the goals of its development from minimizing impacts on sociocultural-ecological systems (SES) towards the ability of tourism to contribute to the improvement and restoration of SES. Many authors consider it a significant paradigm shift, which they also refer to as a separate line of development outside sustainable tourism. Although there are already relatively solid theoretical frameworks for the concept of regenerative tourism, it has not been sufficiently developed in the area of cultural heritage restoration. This study responds to this gap by applying a regenerative framework to a specific case of a historical building-the wooden church of Sf & acirc;ntul Gheorghe in Prod & abreve;nesti, Romania. The aim of the research is to empirically assess the extent to which the microclimatic and environmental conditions of the building are compatible with the principles of regenerative cultural heritage management and how they affect its physical integrity and usability in the context of local tourism and community needs. Methodologically, the study is based on long-term monitoring of the internal microclimate, which took place between August 2024 and January 2025. The subject of monitoring was the measurement of temperature, relative humidity, particulate matter PM2.5 and PM10, volatile organic compounds, light intensity, acoustic intensity, negative and positive ions. Within the research, biological degradation factors (lichens, microorganisms) were examined, and the research was supplemented by a non-invasive investigation using infrared thermography to capture the momentary condition of the surface temperature and interior painting in the wooden church, which is in a state of significant decay.The results show a significant exceedance of the recommended temperature and relative humidity values, a high dependence of the interior environment on external climatic conditions, and the presence of biological degradation processes that negatively affect the authentic building materials and preserved fragments of interior decoration. It transpires that the physical degradation of the building is not an isolated technical problem, but a manifestation of the broader dynamics of the SES within cultural heritage management. Recommendations include the introduction of continuous microclimatic monitoring, the application of non-invasive conservation measures. The proposals include adaptive management, which combines data-driven decision-making with community participation, and enables flexible responses to the SES dynamics of cultural heritage systems.
This paper deals with the framing of NATO's political-geographic imaginations in the Western Balkans. The focus of the research is on the media portrayal of NATO, i.e. it includes a media analysis of 190 articles on NATO's enlargement to Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia. The selected articles were researched over three time periods from 2008 to 2021. The results show that over the period of three NATO enlargements, the number of articles framed negatively in today's non-members nor the number of articles framed positively in today's NATO members of the Western Balkans has not increased. In fact, the opposite processes have occurred; a decrease in negative articles in members and an increase in positive articles in non-members. The research confirmed that the choice of photographs and keywords in members is consistent with NATO's professional political-geographic imagination. The results confirm that the media, by choosing the mentioned countries and the mentioned politicians, emphasize Euro-Atlantic integration. In the end, it turned out that Serbia and Russia are presented as "enemy" states with the aim of opposing the leading Euro-Atlantic narrative.
This article analyses the geographical thought of Emil Mazur (1925-1990), one of the most important figures in Slovak geography during the second half of the 20th century. Through intertextual and genealogical analysis, it explores how Mazur critically received allochthonous influences, such as systems theory, cybernetics, the quantitative revolution, Soviet constructive geography and German axiomatics, and transformed them into autochthonous contributions, including landscape syntheses, the category of space, the axiomatisation of geography and the concept of landscape potential. This paper pursues several objectives. First, at the theoretical - methodological level, we aim to develop a methodology for identifying and analysing autochthonous and allochthonous determinants, and their mutual interference, in the study of geographical thought development. This framework should also include a procedure for identifying the developmental trajectories of a given author's thinking. Empirically, we aim to uncover and interpret the evolution of Mazur's geographical thought by analysing a corpus of texts for which he was the lead or sole author. Particular attention is devoted to identifying autochthonous and allochthonous influences and their mutual interactions, culminating in a synthesis that demonstrates how these influences were transformed into original concepts within Slovak geography, and the implications for contemporary disciplinary discourse (epistemological, methodological and institutional) within the Slovak geographical school.
