60 percent of Turks worried about climate crisis: Survey

Emre Eser – ISTANBUL

Some 60 percent of Turks are worried about climate change, according to recent survey conducted by KONDA, which is a research and consultancy firm that specializes in public opinion polling.

The survey named “The Perception of Climate Change in Turkey 2019” has been conducted with 2,745 people in one-to-one meetings in their dwellings in 29 provinces.

Some 50 percent of the participants said they had already started to feel the effects of climate change.

Some 71 percent the survey participants said climate-related natural calamities such as floods and drought had increased in the last years worldwide, pinpointing the reason of such disasters to the cli-mate crisis.

Some 23 percent of the participants, on the other hand, said they had not observed any unusual weather events in the last years. The majority of those who said they were not worried about the climate change issue and could not see its effects said, “I am not worried because I do not know what climate change is.”

Leo Barasi, an expert in climate change, expressed his opinion about KONDA’s newly conducted sur-vey. “It is not a surprise that a majority of people in Turkey say they are worried about these [climate] changes. The number of people feeling very worried about climate change is three times the number of people not feeling any worried,” he said.

“Also, the number of those believing that local administrations are giving sufficient struggle regarding this issue stands at only 15 percent. All these issues show that climate change will be an important agen-da item in politics in a near future. In elections that are done currently in the world, the most important campaign topic is climate crisis. We’ll also see these effects in Turkey,” he said.

“According to the research results, those living in Turkey are now personally feeling climate change and the effects of this change in a very serious way,” KONDA chairperson Bekir Ağırdır said.

“Also, despite the nonsufficient number of scientific works regarding this issue in Turkey, which is one of the mostly affected countries from climate change, it is an important progress that people are feeling these effects,” he also said.