An evaluation of local policies and actions that address climate change in Turkish metropolitan cities

ABSTRACT

As sites of climatic impacts, cities have become key players in climate policy-making in order to reduce GHG emissions and vulnerabilities of settlements. They started taking actions in various fields such as built environment, water and waste management, transportation and urban greenery. However, the involvement of cities in climate policy-making varies over countries and regions; the extent of involvement differentiates even among the cities of the same country. This paper focuses on the Turkish case and elaborates the current status of climate policy-making in Turkish metropolitan cities. It aims at identifying achievements at the local level and pointing to challenges for an effective local climate action, which can be helpful for other contexts, too. Having conducted both desk-based and questionnaire surveys, it examines and categorizes climate-related actions in metropolitan municipalities, and highlights varying levels of achievements in terms of sectors and innovativeness. The study concludes with analysing the motives behind varying achievements of municipalities as well as the main challenges for local action and discussing policy implications to overcome them.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• urban responses
• metropolitan municipalities
• Turkey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See http://www4.unfccc.int/submissions/INDC/Submission%20Pages/submissions.aspx.

2 In the two-tier municipality system of Turkey, upper-tier municipalities are named ‘greater municipalities’. This paper uses the term ‘metropolitan municipality’ since it is a more common term in the literature.

3 Based on the examination of key policy documents of municipalities and the results of the questionnaire survey, we listed climate change-related (a) goals and objectives, (b) concrete actions and projects, (c) institutional arrangements and (d) networking initiatives launched by the case-study municipalities. In total, we specified 188 policy responses under these four categories (types) by eight different sectors. While Figure 1 shows the sectoral breakdown of the total 188 policy responses initiated by the case-study municipalities, Figure 2 displays the distribution of the responses by both types and sectors. The (+) sign on Figure 2 has no affirmative judgement but indicates the presence of a particular policy response.

4 The information was compiled from different online sources including municipalities’ webpages.

5 The information was compiled from different online sources including municipalities’ webpages.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Middle East Technical University through its Scientific Research Programme [grant number BAP-02-02-2014-001].