Turkey's environment needs care

Hurriyet Daily News (Turkey): … Another year, another June 5: World Environment Day was marked once again, for the 37th time since being designated by the United Nations, but Turkey still has many environmental issues to contend with.

The Turkey branch of the World Wildlife Foundation, the Turkish Environmental and Woodlands Protection Society, or TÜRÇEK, and the Nature Society came together to lay out Turkey’s environmental problems in 2009. The picture they have painted is not a pretty one. The environmentalists’ joint opinion is that Turkey’s primary problem is wrongheaded policies on water and other resources.

…"Many types of habitats in Turkey have been irreversibly destroyed, especially in the last 30 to 40 years," [Filiz] Demirayak [of WWF in Turkey said]….. "In the western Black Sea region of northern Anatolia, 79 percent of coastal sand dunes have been destroyed, along with 85 percent of the brushwood; approximately 1.3 million hectares of wetlands are gone. The rate of water available per person has dropped from 4,000 cubic meters to 1,430 cubic meters. Turkey is rapidly turning into a water-poor country."

….The groups defined the most urgent problems on Turkey’s environmental agenda as follows:

• The biggest salt lake in Europe has diminished by almost half in 18 years.
• One of the terminals of the power plant at Afşin Elbistan has been operating without a filter for years, polluting surrounding areas.
• The almost 400 hydroelectric plants planned for many provinces, Artvin and Rize foremost among them, means death for the streams they are going to be built on.
• The Great Menderes Basin, the primary water source of İzmir, has been poisoned…

I couldn't resist this infrared shot of Kızılcahamam in Turkey, by Nevit Dilmen, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2