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A “crazy project.” Those are the words Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used back in 2011, when he first unveiled Kanal Istanbul, a massive shipping canal project. Slated to begin construction in 2023, the canal will connect the Black Sea to waters leading to the Mediterranean. It will run parallel to the Bosphorus strait, which critics say is redundant, at best, and at worst — an environmental catastrophe. 

“The city will start developing toward the north, which is where all the forests, water basins and agricultural areas are,” said Duygu Dağ, who leads the environmental justice program at the Center for Spatial Justice, a Turkish civil society organization. “The south of the city depends on the north. The clean air, the tap water, everything comes from the north.”

Sazlibosna, and areas like it, provide much of the fresh fruit and vegetables sold in Instanbul. It’s unclear, she said, how the loss of these agricultural areas may impact urban sustenance. 

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced in Istanbul that the Fatih drilling ship has discovered reserves of 320 billion cubic metres of natural gas in the Black Sea, and that Turkey will start using this in 2023

Turkey depends on imports for its oil and gas requirements. Last year, consumption of natural gas in the country was 44.9 billion cubic metres, and 99 per cent of this came from countries such as Russia, Iran and Azerbaijan. The gas discovered by the Fatih will reduce this total dependence on foreign energy supplies and strengthen Ankara’s position in energy deals

Turkish research and exploration vessels are confident that new fields will be discovered, helping Turkey to move from being an energy importer to an exporter.

for NATO-member Turkey, the stakes could not be higher. Its 2,000 kilometre-long Black Sea coastline stretching from the Bulgarian border in the West to Georgia in the East is the longest of any of the Sea's littoral states,  including Russia and Ukraine.

Turkey’s stakes are magnified by last year’s discovery of a natural gas field in its Black Sea littoral waters that, according to Energy Minister Fatih Donmez, could by 2027 provide nearly a third of Turkey’s domestic needs.

“Syria remains Turkey’s soft spot. For that matter, Russia is likely to put pressure on Turkey through Syria,” said Turkey scholar Galip Dalay. “At a broader level, Russia and Turkey have cooperated and competed with each other through the conflict spots in the Middle East and North Africa. However, Moscow has been less open to repeating this experience with Turkey in the ex-Soviet area."

With Ukraine’s seaports blockaded or captured by Russian forces, neighboring Romania’s Black Sea port of Constanta has emerged as a main conduit for the war-torn country’s grain exports amid a growing world food crisis.It’s Romania’s biggest port, home to Europe’s fastest-loading grain terminal, and has processed nearly a million tons of grain from Ukraine — one of the world’s biggest exporters of wheat and corn — since the Feb. 24 invasion.But port operators say that maintaining, let alone increasing, the volume they handle could soon be impossible without concerted European Union support and investment.

Constanta’s proximity by land to Ukraine, and by sea to the Suez Canal, make it the best current route for Ukrainian agricultural exports. Other alternatives include road and rail shipments across Ukraine’s western border into Poland and its Baltic Sea ports.

U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization projects up to 181 million people in 41 countries could face food crisis or worse levels of hunger this year in connection with the Ukraine war.

Turkey and Romania have scrambled in recent days to neutralize potentially explosive mines amid concerns that the weapons may be drifting across the Black Sea from Ukraine’s shores toward neighboring countries.

Turkey’s government had said previously that it was in contact with both Moscow and Kyiv about the weapons, but did not specify which side, if either, was responsible for the mines

Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, claimed on March 19 that poor weather had caused more than 400 naval mines to become disconnected from the cables that were anchoring them, and warned that the mines were “drifting freely in the western part of the Black Sea,” which includes the territorial waters of Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey.