According to recent surveys, the population is overwhelmingly worried about escalating climate change impacts and the destruction of forests. Climate change: Forward-looking goals, backward-trending pathĪs Turkey plans its 100th anniversary celebration, some wonder what the nation’s environment will look like at its bicentennial. The billboard claims the building is the largest courthouse in Europe.
The Istanbul Çağlayan Justice Palace, a courthouse inaugurated in 2011. “The emphasis of the AKP regime has always been on growth figures we can even call it ‘growth fetishism.’” Within that framework, “it’s very easy to forget or undermine the likely social and ecological side effects,” Fikret Ataman, a professor of economics at the Bosphorus University in Istanbul, told Mongabay.
Not surprisingly, when it comes to the environment, Erdoğan’s party has fully embraced neoliberal ideology and set rapid economic growth as a chief goal. While the AKP has broken away from Atatürk’s secular legacy (with the party’s elite rooted deeply in Islam), Turkey’s dedication to unbridled development has remained relentless. In power for the past two decades, current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party - known as the AKP in Turkish - are no exception. Countless leaders and parties have taken turns governing since his death in 1938, but catching up with the West has remained a top priority for most Turkish statesmen. Heavily influenced by the French enlightenment, Atatürk set out to transform a poor agrarian country into a developed nation through industrialization and modernization. The country’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk - a military leader during World War I and the nation’s subsequent War of Independence - is well-known for his staunch secularist views and policies. The Republic of Turkey isn’t quite yet a century old, having emerged from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire on October 29, 1923. As activists and academics criticize the lack of transparency regarding environmental data, they face rising governmental pressures and repression. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s authoritarianism has undermined checks and balances which might otherwise enhance environmental governance.For the past two decades, Turkey’s economic growth has been based on carbon-intensive sectors - including fossil fuel energy, transportation, construction, mining and heavy industry - all heavily supported by the state via subsidies, questionable public-private partnerships, and lax environmental laws.In addition to unregulated carbon emissions, experts are concerned over the nation’s worsening air and plastic pollution, altered land use due to new mega-infrastructure projects, and biodiversity harm. Turkey may also be exceeding limits to many of the nine planetary boundaries critical to the survival of civilization.It has failed so far to take meaningful action against the steady increase of its greenhouse gas emissions. Turkey, an increasingly autocratic country since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AKP political party came to power in 2002, was the very last G20 nation to ratify the Paris climate agreement, doing so in October 2021.
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