We extend results proved by the second author (Amer. J. Math., 2009) for nonnegatively curved Alexandrov spaces to general compact Alexandrov spaces $X$ with curvature bounded below. The gradient flow of a geodesically convex functional on the quadratic Wasserstein space $(\mathcal P(X),W_2)$ satisfies the evolution variational inequality. Moreover, the gradient flow enjoys uniqueness and contractivity. These results are obtained by proving a first variation formula for the Wasserstein distance.

The main purpose of this paper is to determine isotropic immersions of complex space forms into real space forms with low codimension. This is an improvement of a result of S. Maeda.