I’m writing this blog entry from Batumi, Georgia, sitting on a beach chair and gazing across the Black Sea. This morning we left Turkey and entered Georgia, where we quickly realized just how much Turkish we had learned in our six weeks in the country. In Turkish, we can count to a thousand, make basic conversation about the weather, ask someone how many children they have, and ask if we can set up a tent for the night (our grammar is horrible, but we could communicate). In Georgian, we only know how to say “thank you.” It’s much harder to talk to people.

I’m working on a video summary of Turkey, which will show the many highlights: campsites along lakes, rivers, and the Black Sea; families who have hosted us in the countryside and cities; countless stops for tea; the five-times-a-day call to prayer; witnessing the incredible pace of progress in a rapidly growing country — cranes everywhere, building new apartment complexes, new roads, and new power plants. Stay tuned.

With respect to climate change, below are our thoughts after crossing Turkey. These are the generalizations reached by biking across a country and talking with as many people as possible. It was reached by speaking with experts and advocates in Istanbul, Ankara, and Diyarbakir, and speaking with laypeople we met in the cities and countryside. It is not a scientific survey so much as a set of impressions.

1) Global warming is a low priority for Turkish civil society. We met few environmental advocates who focus exclusively on this issue — in fact, the main environmental movements in Turkey appear to be opposing new nuclear and hydropower plants, both of which are relatively good ideas if you care only about climate change.

2) Global warming is very low on the political agenda. When talking with experts and reading over the official plans for the next decade, I see that greenhouse gas emissions are not a significant priority. The main priorities for Turkey’s energy future are to increase energy supply and reduce the amount of energy the country imports. This is a mixed bag from a global warming perspective: it means both more coal and more hydropower and wind.

3) External international pressure matters. While in Istanbul, we learned that Turkey has renewable energy targets; that the main reason they have them is because they want to be part of the EU, and the EU requires countries to have such targets.

4) Decisions Turkey makes today will make a big difference to future emissions. What we saw in Turkey is a country that is rapidly building infrastructure — new roads, dams, and buildings. This infrastructure will be there for decades. One advocate shared with me a summary of all the proposed power plants — and then noted that not all will be built. Some won’t be funded or will prove impractical, and others will be stopped by local opposition. We heard from a second advocate that only about one in seven of the proposed hydropower plants in the country’s rainy northeast would be built, largely because of local resistance to them. With regards to energy, Turkey can build many more coal and natural gas plants, or build more non-carbon polluting sources.

Many advocates we met questioned whether Turkey even needs all of these new power plants. While there are many ways the country can become more efficient with its energy, and thus reduce current and future emissions compared to business as usual, this is actually a broader question over development, and whether we “need” so much energy and consumption to be a fulfilled, healthy, happy, prosperous society. Personally, I like to sidestep this question, as it seems inevitable that Turkey’s energy demand will grow (it currently uses about 1/5th as much energy per person as the U.S.), and rather than asking whether or not it should grow, I’m focused on how it will grow.

5) It is getting warmer in Turkey, and people are noticing. You can see a longer blog entry about this here, but we were surprised by how many people said they thought it was warmer than when they were a child — even when they didn’t know what global warming was.

6) We’re reminded why it is so hard to address climate change. In our conversations, it was apparent how intrinsically local environmentalism is — the biggest environmental movements in Turkey appear to be opposing specific new power plants by local communities. It’s hard to in turn think globally — what is best for a community or region (for example, building natural gas power plants instead of hydropower or nuclear) might not be what is best for the world (since fossil fuel power plants have higher greenhouse gas emissions). Also, we’re reminded how hard it is to work together. I usually think about how countries have to work together to solve this problem, but traveling through Kurdish Turkey, I’m reminded how much trouble countries have working together within their own borders. Lindsey writes more on this in her recent post from Kurdistan.

Again, this is a list of impressions from biking across the country and talking with people we met. If you disagree with any of these thoughts, or think we should be considering other issues as we bike, please let us know in the comments below.

After taking another day to recover and reflect here in Batumi, Georgia, we are going to take the next week to bike across this small former Soviet country — and ride north into the Great Caucasus mountains. Check back in a week for more stories and photos from the road.

In Diyarbakir, we were interviewed by a reporter for an online newspaper associated with Mezopotamya Ekoloji Hareketi, a group working with local municipalities to prevent ecological destruction in Kurdistan. When preparing for the interview, we thought about the questions we might be asked and wrote up some notes.

We figured we would be asked about the overall purpose of our trip, and we boiled it down to 3 major goals:

Also, we thought they’d ask what we have learned about climate change in Turkey. Our answer comes from 3 different sources:

The interview ended up being a bit different than we anticipated. The reporter first asked about what sort of ecological destruction we had seen in Turkey as we rode. This question got us thinking about the areas we had ridden through – mostly we’ve been going through small towns and the countryside where, with the exception of a day or two of forests and the ride along Lake Tuz, it’s been mostly farmland. Whether farming counts as ecological destruction depends on your perspective; one thing David has remarked on many times during this trip is the vastness of the human footprint. Biking through Mesopotamia, we can’t help but mull over human history and the ways the landscape around us has been altered, from megafauna extinctions, to the development of agriculture and permanent human settlements, to the many hydroelectric and irrigation dams built on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.

We responded that we’d seen a lot of construction – new roads, dams, pipelines, power plants, buildings, transmission lines; but that we didn’t know what degree of destruction they had caused. We did go up the Euphrates – or rather, the Birecik Reservoir, where we saw several drowned villages, which certainly is destruction of a kind. We also visited the Ataturk Dam, which holds back a reservoir bigger than any in the U.S.; there’s no way a dam of that scale didn’t cause considerable ecological destruction.

The rest of the interview/conversation was mostly about dams and politics, two inseparable issues in Turkey. In fact, everything seems to come down to politics, especially in Kurdistan – the southeastern part of the country, where the population is largely Kurdish. While we observed a consistent displeasure across the country regarding government-backed hydropower and nuclear projects, it seems more personal in the southeast: people feel that the government has a policy of taking good things – power, water – from the east and transferring them to the west, leaving behind pollution and destroyed landscapes. We were asked what we thought people in this region should do to preserve their environment in the face of unfavorable governmental policies. It was a question we were not prepared to answer; there is a long history of oppression, violence, and distrust in this part of the country that as outsiders we can only get a glimpse of. We don’t have enough context and local knowledge to offer advice on whether and how to push back against a powerful central government on projects that are a core part of its program.

As we talked, we felt a tension similar to that we’ve been feeling all along on this trip: Turkey is installing more energy capacity – what form should it take? Dams are very unpopular – there are three planned on the Tigris near Diyarbakir alone, one of which would flood a large patch of farms and gardens where most of the produce for the city comes from. If they don’t build those dams, will they build coal or natural gas power plants instead? What local treasures might those destroy, in addition to creating greenhouse gas emissions that affect the whole world? Or could Turkey choose not to build new energy projects? Many environmentalists argue that they don’t improve anybody’s lives and that the energy isn’t necessary. (On the other hand, in the apartment where we are staying in Diyarbakir, the electricity has gone out several times a day – and Turkey’s energy consumption per capita is much lower than the average developed country.)

When we set off across Turkey, we hoped to answer some of these questions. Two thirds of our way across the country, we don’t feel much closer to the answers. Instead, we’ve become more acutely aware of why it is so hard for us to address climate change. For one, environmentalism is intrinsically local, and what is best for a community or region (for example, building natural gas power plants instead of hydropower or nuclear) might not be what is best for the world (since fossil fuel power plants have higher greenhouse gas emissions). Also, climate change is a problem that we all have to work together to solve. Getting the countries of the world to work together seems all the more daunting when you observe how people struggle to work together within national borders, as we’ve witnessed here in Kurdistan where people complain of an oppressive national government and Turkish fighter jets make flyovers several times a day, drowning out conversation.

If anything, this tension between the local and the global, and the personal nature of the anti-dam movements, highlights why we’re doing this trip: to personalize climate change. A dam under construction poised to drown a village that has been inhabited for over 10,000 years (such as Ilisu Dam, which will flood Hasankeyf) is immediate, dramatic, and personal. Right now, it’s hard to show that any particular event – hurricanes in the Philippines, droughts in Turkey or California – is due to climate change, but the science suggests that these kinds of destructive events are likely to become more frequent and intense as the planet warms. In order to inspire action with the same passion we see in the anti-dam movements here, we need to understand how climate change – an abstract, slow-moving, global phenomenon – could ultimately be as locally damaging as a nuclear power plant or dam – perhaps even more so. As we mentioned in our interview, it is our hope that the stories we share will help demonstrate this and move people just a little closer to action.

Through Google translate and an extremely basic command of the Turkish language — as well as talking with English speakers — we have been asking people as we travel if the climate has changed where they live.

We’ve been surprised by how unanimous the response is: nearly everyone says that it is warmer than it once was. A man who works at a store near Kahramanmaras who is roughly our age (mid thirties) said that he used to play in the snow when he was a child, but now he can’t do so with his children. A woman who works at a school in a small town near Aksaray, whose husband works as a shepherd, agreed that the amount of snow today is much less than it used to be. People we meet at gas stations, where we often stop for food, also agree. When we ask more specifically about when it has gotten warmer, we’ve been able to make out that things have been changing over the last five to ten years. A good number of people also say that there is less rain, though it’s unclear if they are referring to the recent drought or a trend of many years.

Using Google Translate to Ask about Global Warming

When we ask why the weather has changed, we’ve also been surprised by how many people don’t know. According to a 2010 gallup poll, between a half and a quarter of Turks have never heard of climate change. Some, though, are quite aware. A wheat farmer in the Kurdish region, who we stayed with just a few nights ago, was one of the few people who, unprompted, used the term “global warming,” and who said it was caused by human pollution. He also said that warmer temperatures had made growing wheat much more difficult.

To figure out what weather stations in the region have actually recorded, I turned to a tool created by the University of East Anglia, where they show all the weather stations in the world that they use to calculate how the earth’s temperature has changed. I turned this Google Earth tool into an online map, shown below. Click on any of the points, and you’ll see the average temperature for that weather station for its entire period of record.

First, you’ll note that there isn’t data for many years (to see the average warming across weather stations, download the Google Earth tool and open it in Google Earth). Secondly, you’ll note that the majority of stations (and especially ones near our route) agree with what people have been saying: the past decade has been significantly warmer than previous decades.

Also, according to a 2010 study by David Lobell of Stanford University, Turkey is one of the countries whose wheat crop has been most affected by warming temperatures in the past 30 years — in a sense echoing exactly what the Kurdish farmer said.

I’m often skeptical of people’s abilities to perceive climate change, partially because I can’t easily remember what the weather was like ten years ago, and because I’ve read over a number of scientific papers showing how easily our belief in global warming is affected by last week’s weather (one cold month, and you often hear people doubting that climate change exists). Yet here in Turkey, it appears that the climate is getting warmer, and that people are feeling it.

When in Istanbul, we visited the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and learned about how Turkey’s official plan is to expand renewables, nuclear power, coal, and hydropower. This week, in Ankara, we met with a number of advocates and experts, and gained a fuller appreciation for Turkey’s energy and climate future.

We were lucky to have many conversations in Ankara. We met with three members of Ekoloji Kolektifi, an environmental collective, and talked generally about environmental issues in Turkey. We also spoke with Erdal Apaçik, who sits on the board of the Electrical Engineers Chamber, as their organization is opposing nuclear power plants in the country, and we wanted to learn about Turkey’s energy politics. We spoke with professors at ODTU, one of Turkey’s top universities, about sea level rise, changing precipitation patterns, and the effects of climate change on Turkey’s lakes. We met with Onder Algedik, a consultant who has also helped organize events for the local chapter of 350.org (including an awesome bike event a few years ago). And we had dinner with Mustafa Berke, who works on climate issues for WWF in Turkey, and Göksen Sahin, who is the environment policy coordinator and climate policy officer for TEMA (Turkish Foundation for Combating Soil Erosion, for Reforestation and the Protection of Natural Habitats), Turkey’s largest environmental group (they claim 500,000 volunteers, or about one out of every 140 Turks).

We had fewer meetings with scientists than we would have liked, but the basic message was pretty simple: It will get drier and warmer in most of Turkey, affecting ecosystems and water management, and structures built along its long coastline will need to be protected or rethought as sea levels rise. The details, though, are unclear, and the scientists emphasized the uncertainties — we aren’t sure how much precipitation will change, or how quickly sea levels will rise.

From the advocates, what we saw was environmental movements opposing various energy development projects, with the fight against nuclear power and new hydropower plants being perhaps the strongest movements. Turkey currently has no nuclear power, but one plant, developed by Russia, is currently under construction, and another, to be built by Japanese engineers, is mostly approved. Both, however, are delayed. When we were walking through the streets of Ankara, we even saw three Greenpeace activists trying to raise money and gain members. They spoke very little English, but they talked first and foremost about opposing nuclear power.

Our conversation at the Chamber of Electrical Engineers was also interesting. Erdal Apaçik, whom we spoke with, sits on the board of the Chamber’s national assembly. He told us through an interpreter that nuclear power was unsafe, not secure, and expensive, and that the waste problem had not been sorted out. He argued that Turkey has a horrible safety record in different parts of society (and I don’t doubt it — I’ve seen countless construction sites where no one wears a hard hat, and the incident in the Soma coal mine doesn’t boost confidence, either), and that they are also very prone to earthquakes — two strong arguments against nuclear power. He also argued that they had to use outside technology and uranium, instead of using Turkish resources. When we asked Erdal what types of energy projects should be built, he said that energy efficiency was the biggest resource, and added that renewables such as solar and wind should also be developed.

Onder Algedik, who has worked with 350.org and also consults for the World Bank, told me how he organized 50 people to lobby members of the Turkish government to act more aggressively on climate change. Whereas in Istanbul I was told that the best Turkey could do in the next two decades was to grow its emissions more slowly, Onder told me that they could actually cut emissions by 15 percent. His explanation was similar to Erdal’s: Turkey is horribly inefficient, and can save immense amounts of energy, thus cutting emissions. (After our interview, I had this run in with tear gas).

Over dinner with Mustafa Berke of WWF in Turkey and Göksen Sahin of TEMA, we had an informal conversation about energy issues in the country. We talked a good deal about hydropower plants. The country has plans on the books to almost double its hydropower capacity, but almost all new power will come from small dams and run-of-the-river style hydropower. The run-of-the-river plants, in theory, are supposed to be better for the environment, as they leave water in the river. In practice, some of them have actually taken all of the water out of the river (when I spoke with the president of the Turkish Water Institute in Istanbul, he acknowledged that many of them had been poorly implemented, even if they were good designs).

Mustafa explained that the number of power plants “on the books” is much, much greater than the number that will be built – some may not pass their environmental reviews, and many face strong public opposition. We got the impression from most of our conversations that opposition is usually ignored – for example, the dam on the Ilisu River that will flood the current and historical town of Hasankeyf, has gone forward despite local and international pressure. However, people seemed confident that many of these projects will be built – some advocates in the northeast of Turkey, where numerous new reservoirs are planned, believe that only one in seven of the government’s planned dams will be built.

In the meantime, the country is busy building more coal and natural gas infrastructure. Natural gas is expensive and puts the country at the mercy of Russia, which provides a large quantity of the country’s gas. And coal is perhaps the absolute worst energy source for climate change — in addition to its more immediate human cost, as shown by the recent mining disaster. There is some opposition to these sources of energy (and the opposition to coal might be stronger after the recent disaster), but as some of the advocates told us, there is less opposition to them than to nuclear and hydropower.

The question that Lindsey and I keep asking ourselves is this: What is good for Turkey, and what is good for the world? People understandably don’t want a nuclear power plant in their backyard, or for their land to be flooded or their rivers destroyed. But a country like Turkey is likely going to need more energy, even if it manages to become far more efficient. Turkey contributes only about one percent of global emissions. Why should they sacrifice their rivers and towns, and take risks with nuclear power that many in the US are unwilling to accept, for the global good?

Obviously, we should all act together – every coal plant built in Turkey, or anywhere, locks in a certain amount of carbon emissions for several decades. But these environmental movements feel so local. And talking with everyone, it seems that climate change is extremely low on everyone’s list of priorities. And with all the talk about efficiency and the country’s vast solar potential, why are coal, gas, hydropower, and nuclear being pushed so aggressively? We will continue to answer these questions as we travel.

A few days after arriving in Istanbul, we biked to the Turkish Water Institute, a think tank established as a special funded entity under the Ministry of Forestry and Water Affairs. We took a ferry over to the Anatolian side of Istanbul, then slowly wound our way over and under highways to reach the Institute on our bikes.

Turkey and California have a lot in common when it comes to water. While Turkey is twice as large as California (783,562 km² versus 423,970 km²), it’s also about twice as populous (75 million versus 38 million people), meaning they have similar population density. Both California and Turkey are challenged by the spatial and temporal distribution of precipitation. They have a Mediterranean climate, meaning rainfall is very seasonal, with wet winters and dry summers. Their populations are also largely centered away from where most of the rain falls. These two factors mean that storage and transportation play a large role in water management and use. Turkey and California also have a fairly similar breakdown of how water is used by the major sectors.

Agriculture is a major water user, and both Turkey and California are large producers and exporters of a variety of crops. Like California, Turkey produces a range of fresh produce and nuts. Most of its arable land is dedicated to grains – especially wheat – and it is also a major producer of cotton.

Another similarity is that both Turkey and California have experienced serious drought this year. In January, Istanbul had only about 100 days of water reserves, according to the Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies. The city is supplied with water from 10 dams in the Marmara and Black Sea regions, and the water levels in these reservoirs were all at their lowest point in six years, around 35 percent capacity, and in January three were not able to supply any water. However, it appears that officials were not terribly concerned, and there was even some disagreement among the ministries about whether there was enough water in reservoirs to meet electricity demands. California is facing similar shortages. On January 17, the governor declared a drought state of emergency, urging consumers to conserve water and stating that the State Water Project, a system of reservoirs and aqueducts that moves water across the state to urban and agricultural consumers, would not be able to provide any deliveries this summer. More recently, releases have been increased to five percent of normal, which is still the least amount of water that has been provided since deliveries began in the 1960s.

Despite these features in common, there are a number of key differences in water supply and management in California and Turkey. First, Californians use much more water than Turks. Depending on how you measure it, per capita consumption of water in Turkey in 2008 was 112 liters (30 gallons) to 215 liters (57 gallons) per day (the lower figure is billed water consumption, and the higher figure is total water abstracted divided by population – this indicates that half of the water is lost before it reaches the customer, or is not billed). In California, per capita water consumption in 2010 was 460 liters (124 gallons) per day (I believe this is billed water consumption). These figures reflect water delivered to individual consumers (not, for example, embedded water in food consumption, or industrial water use divided over population). Based on these numbers, Californians use two to four times as much water as people in Turkey.

Turkey and California are also at very different stages in ‘developing’ their water resources. As mentioned above, infrastructure to store and transport water is important in places where people live far from where rain falls, and where precipitation is highly seasonal. Istanbul has a long history of moving and storing water, dating back to the city’s founding as Constantinople, the eastern capital of the Roman Empire. We visited the Basilica Cistern and the Valens Aqueduct and were impressed with the massive scale of these projects: the aqueduct, itself about one kilometer long but part of a network that ultimately was over 250 km long, moved water from the hills near the city to over 100 underground cisterns. The Basilica Cistern, now a tourist attraction in the Sultanamhet neighborhood, is approximately 9,800 square meters (105,000 square feet), and can hold 80,000 cubic meters (2,800,000 cubic feet) of water. Constructed during the 3rd and 4th centuries, the Cistern supplied water to the Topkapi Palace and continued to supply water for the city after Ottoman times.

Overall, Turkey has come to large water projects more recently than California has. There are at least 1,400 dams in the State of California, with a combined reservoir capacity of over 45 million acre-feet and over 130 power projects. Most of these dams were built decades ago. Dam-building is now almost non-existent, partly due to having run out of places to put them – only a few rivers are undammed from the mountains to the ocean, and we have used most of our good reservoir sites. In addition, public opposition and environmental laws have influenced how we use and value our rivers. A good summary of the history and future of dams in California can be found in a series of blog postings by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In Turkey, on the other hand, dam building is on the upswing. According to one source, there are currently 485 dams in Turkey, while another source states that there are 635 large dams in the country. Of these, only eight were built before 1960, which indicates how quickly the country has been constructing dams. And Turkey plans to build more. According to one source, in the next twelve years, Turkey plans to nearly double the total number of dams in the country. The government utility DSI currently has 24 hydropower projects under construction, some of which are part of the Southeastern Anatolia Project, which includes 22 dams and 19 hydraulic power plants. The dam-building trend has not gone unnoticed, and one of the largest environmental and social movements in the country is the anti-dam movement. This movement, mostly comprised of local campaigns where dams are under construction or planned, is fighting not only environmental damage, but also the displacement of populations and destruction of historical sites in valleys flooded by reservoirs.

Turkey and California both face changes to their water resources due to climate change. Along the Black Sea coast in Turkey, precipitation is expected to increase, but in the inland areas, it is expected to decrease – overall, surface runoff is projected to decrease significantly later this century. In California, precipitation is expected to change in terms of when and how it falls. More is expected as rain, and less as snow. California depends heavily on snowfall in the mountains, which acts as a natural reservoir that holds winter’s precipitation until it is needed in the dry season, and then releasing it into the many rivers and reservoirs downstream. On Turkey’s two major international rivers – the Tigris and Euphrates – a 12% decrease of the average annual discharge is expected in Turkey by 2040–2069 . The reduction in discharge – along with the many dams installed or planned for these rivers – has implications not only for Turkey, but for Iraq and Syria downstream.

As Turkey’s economy continues to grow, and as its thirst for water – for cities, agriculture, and energy – increases while overall supply decreases, a critical question must be answered: will Turkey follow California’s pattern, damming nearly every major river to harness its energy and divert its waters? Or will it look to other water and energy sources, leaving some rivers wild and valleys un-flooded? Which is the right course for the country? We will investigate these questions further as we travel, visiting parts of Turkey that are facing a drier future, including the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.