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Land Degradation In Turkey Essay

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In the past decades Turkey, like many neighboring countries, has faced a growth in population and an expediential rise in migration from rural areas to urban cities. This rapid rise of population in urban areas has brought with it a fear of environmental degradation and rise in risk exposure. The government of Turkey has taken steps in order to lessen impacts on the environment by placing the “environmental law” and the creation of National Ministry of Environment created in 1991(EIA, 2010). However land degradation in Turkey is not solely due to population growth or human behavior in that matter. Due to its geographic positioning the country has an extreme climate that can change in the same area from extreme cold and snow to drought and …show more content…

Acording to the report produced by Univeristy of Gothenburg the most significant form of land degradation in turkey is erosion, 73% of agriculture land is prone to erosion and during the last decade over 16,000ha has been lost mainly of the 17% prime agriculture land. Though 86% of turkey’s overall land is somewhat effected by erosion not all the damages are caused by human activities.
According to the Industry of Public Health in Turkey, even though floods accure more often than landslides; it is the landslides that cause the greatest amount of damages to the structure and property loss in turkey. According to the 2012 World Report it has been ---- that the erosion of land causes more landslides as does deforestation lead to more severe floods; thus it is easy to pinpoint effects of land degradation in disasters and risk exposure. Another cause of risk explosion due to land degradation is deforestation, exposing the country to more floods; also decrease of biodiversity due to rapid urbanization which according to World Risk Report can “affect the coping capability of a country during a disaster” (World Risk Report, 2012).
Emergency management and systematic response to disasters in Turkey are still in their infancy phase and in the event of a catastrophic disaster will be in need of additional help to respond

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