CHALLENGE

The Government of Turkey has become a global leader in the fight against soil erosion, by making extensive investments in rehabilitating degraded landscapes.  With support from the World Bank, poor communities in upland catchments have been engaged in developing and implementing a program of watershed rehabilitation.  This integrated approach has succeeded in helping to tackle the problem of poverty in these communities.  It has also succeeded as a model for rural service delivery by providing a platform for multiple government institutions to work together to be responsive to locally identified constraints and needs.

One weakness of the approach, however, is that the selection of the most critical catchments for investment in land rehabilitation activities remains somewhat subjective.  The current choice of investments which seek to balance the need to rehabilitate badly degraded areas with prevalence of rural poverty and areas hard-hit by urban migration are based largely on perceptions.

APPROACH

This project seeks to identify land degradation hot spots in Turkey, and, working with available datasets on wealth and poverty in Turkey, overlay these with information on where the poorest households are most vulnerable to the problem of land degradation.

The findings will be useful for the Ministry of Environment and Forestry to better target its already extensive investments in watershed rehabilitation on the most critical areas in Turkey where land degradation is both a serious problem and where problems of poverty are most severe and improve the efficiency of public spending on watershed rehabilitation.

The findings will also be linked to ongoing national policy and institutional processes, to complement Turkey’s Action Plan for Combating Deforestation, the measures outlined in the 9th National Development Plan which focus on reducing land degradation, and institutional measures which are expected to complement Turkey’s efforts with respect to accession to the European Union.

RESULTS

This activity is ongoing. Findings will be shared on this page when they become available. You can also follow us on twitter (twitter.com/forestideas) or subscribe to our mailing list for regular updates.