Social & Ecological Transformation

Bülent Şık, a food engineer from Turkey made an extensive analysis on RASFF facts about Turkey and found out that the “lemon case” was not an exception.

What exactly is article 75 about and what is its meaning for the environment? Article 75 ‘Supporting investments in accord with the scale of projects’ authorizes the cabinet to exempt certain infrastructure projects, that due to being controversial are in need of passing standard legal procedures, from the mandatory application of procedures such as  permissions, licenses, allotments, and environmental as well as social impact assessments. 

A study commissioned by the Heinrich Böll Foundation found that the OECD's infrastructure investment advice to the G20 finance track lacks coherence with sustainable development and is “out of sync” with recent achievements of the global community.

Currently, up to 4 million trees are cleared in connection to the construction of the 3rd Bosphorus bridge and a new airport, and this might just be the beginning. Against the background of this threat, Turkish environmentalists have organized protests and taken up the fight against deforestation. Due to problems with democratic decision-making and the rule of law, civil society efforts have so far shown very limited results. One of the pressing questions of the future, therefore, will be which other options are available to civil society to respond to the threat of deforestation. 

To assess the impact of the EU environmental acquis in the context of the EU-Turkey accession negotiations  and reinforce networks between European and Turkish environmental civil society actors, a delegation of Turkish legal experts, parliamentarians, academics and environmental activists visited Brussels between 26th and 29th  January 2016.

Here you will find the program and the video records of the 6.th Green Economy Conference on DEGROWTH which was organised on the 17.10.2015 in Istanbul 

Thomas Fatheuer, Lili Fuhr and Barbara Unmüßig of the Heinrich Böll Foundation set out to explore the basic assumptions, hypotheses and proposed solutions of the green economy and to illustrate and criticize their effects in practice.

It is estimated that there are 3.4 billion hectares of pasture areas all over the world. Twelve percent of these areas are located in China, 11% in Australia, 7 % in the USA, and 6% in Brasil. Turkey is ranked as 46th among the countries having the largest pasture areas in the world with 14,6 million hectares.1

After the restructuring of the agricultural production in Turkey in accordance with the basin-based agriculture model, which is best documented in the “Turkey Agricultural Basin Production and Support Model,” all agricultural lands in Turkey were divided into thirty basins. Even though tobacco had been traditionally produced in twenty three basins, the Production and Support Model did not entail tobacco farming, and therefore tobacco farmers were deprived of state supports, including supports for crude petroleum and fertilizers. The only state support provided to tobacco farmers was land analysis expertise.

The G20 seems to lag behind in acknowledging that gender is one of the fundamental dimension to be considered. Given that its policy stance holds critical implications for gender justice, scrutinizing the G20 from a gender perspective is crucial, especially under the light of its unfolding role and importance in terms of structuring the future of world economies.