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.
Villagers and environmentalists wary of Istanbul mega-canal - 0 views
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“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.”
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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.
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BBC News - Middle East countries hit by storms - 0 views
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Fierce winds and heavy rain and snow have lashed eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries for a second successive day. The storms have sunk a ship off the Israeli coast, closed ports and disrupted shipping in the Suez Canal.
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The storms have ended a long drought in Lebanon, Syria and Israel and come just a week after more than 40 people died in a forest fire.
New Northwest Passage triggers mass species migration | TG Daily - 0 views
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a Pacific gray whale was spotted last year off the coasts of Spain and Israel. Scientists believe the ice-reduced Arctic allowed it to cross into the North Atlantic, from where it wandered its way to the Mediterranean Sea
Canal (Kanal) Istanbul May Displace Thousands, Impact Ocean and Water Quality - 0 views
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“Whoever cuts a branch from my forest, I will cut his head,” Sultan Mehmed II, who led the Ottomans into Istanbul, is said to have ordered in the 1400s. Today, thousands of trucks carrying soil and construction materials kick up dust along the roads north of Istanbul, depleting those forests that had been protected by sultans for five centuries.
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Canal Istanbul (also called Istanbul Kanal), a massive shipping canal meant to route traffic from the Bosporus some 18 miles (30 kilometers) to the east. The homes alongside the new seaway will be replaced with upscale residential and commercial areas. With construction set to start there any day now, real estate speculators descend on the area, clamoring for locals to sell them their land
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When completed, the canal will turn the densest part of the city, including its historic center, into an island. The area also straddles one of the world’s most active fault lines.
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On Blaming Climate Change for the Syrian Civil War - MERIP - 0 views
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the Syria climate conflict narrative is deeply problematic.[2] Not only is the evidence behind this narrative weak. In addition, it masks what was really occurring in rural Syria (and in the country’s northeast region in particular) prior to 2011, which was the unfolding of a long-term economic, environmental and political crisis. And crucially, the narrative largely originated from Syrian regime interests in deflecting responsibility for a crisis of its own making. Syria is less an exemplar of what awaits us as the planet warms than of the complex and uncomfortable politics of blaming climate change.
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much of Syria and the eastern Mediterranean region experienced an exceptionally severe drought in the years before the onset of Syria’s civil war: the single year 2007–2008 was northeastern Syria’s driest on record, as was the three-year period 2006–2009
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an agrarian socialist development program, promoting rapid expansion of the country’s agricultural sector and deploying Soviet aid and oil income to this end. Among other elements, this program involved heavy investment in agricultural and especially water supply infrastructure, low interest loans for private well drilling, price controls on strategic crops at well above international market value, the annual wiping clean of state farm losses and, as already indicated, generous input subsidies
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