President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced late Monday that Turkey now has a ministry focusing on climate change, reaffirming the government’s will to resolve the climate crisis and put the green development revolution at the core of its efforts.
“Turkey is renaming its Environment and Urbanization Ministry as the Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change Ministry,” Erdoğan said following a Cabinet meeting in the capital Ankara.
In addition, the president said a climate change presidency would be established to tackle the issue in a more elaborate manner.
Turkey’s parliament ratified the Paris climate agreement last week, after holding off for years due to what it saw as injustices in its responsibilities as part of the agreement.
Erdoğan said his government expects all political parties, the private sector, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to support green development, which is a “historic project.”
He underlined that climate change concerns every country in the world, stressing that the international community should also take a fair responsibility to tackle climate change, depending on their individual damage to nature.
Announcing that Turkey would ratify the climate deal at the United Nations General Assembly last month, Erdoğan said countries that have a “historical responsibility” for climate change should make the most effort.
“Whoever made the most damage to nature, our air, our water, our soil, the earth; whoever savagely exploited natural resources needs to make the largest contribution to the fight against climate change,” he said.
After it became one of the 191 countries that ratified the climate deal to contribute to global efforts against climate change, Turkey is now expected to set new targets and prepare action plans for emissions reduction.
Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change reached an agreement on Dec. 12, 2015, to fight climate change and achieve a sustainable low-carbon future at the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris.
The Paris Agreement, defined as "a bridge between today's policies and climate-neutrality before the end of the 21st century," seeks to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by stopping global average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels over the next century and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius, if possible.
