More than one-third of Turkish lakes dried in 50 years

ANTALYA

Around 10,000 square meters of wetland have dried in Turkish Lakes Region in five decades due to pollution and the overuse of water, an expert of the Society of the Protection of Turkish Nature (TTKD) has said.

“The Turkish Lakeland had some 17,000 square meters of wetlands in the 1960s. Now the region is maximum 5,000 square meters in size in the summers,” Erol Kesici, a key scientific consultant of RRKD, told Demirören News Agency, adding that more than one third of the region has dried.

The Lakes Region is an area with a series of tectonic lakes within the folds of the Taurus Mountains in Turkey’s southwest.

The Lakeland is located between the provinces of Burdur, Isparta, Antalya, Denizli, Afyonkarahisar and Konya.

With a report he wrote for “World Wetlands Day, Feb. 2,” Kesici stressed, “We are losing the lakes at this geographical location which once hosted the world’s biggest wetlands.”

According to the expert, many of these lands in the region have also been dried purposely as they housed mosquitos and frogs and were “marshy lands.”

“All these lands dried due to different reasons and were indeed sources of natural life and the ecological balance,” he remarked.

According to a research published in 2021, the region “once” consisted of more than 70 lakes. The number decreased rapidly “in time.” Today the major lakes in the region are Acıgöl (Sanaos), Akşehir (Philomela), Beyşehir (Koralis), Burdur (Ascanius), and Eğirdir (Akrotiri).

Ekici especially drew attention to the regions between the Korkuteli and Elmalı districts of the southern province of Antalya. “Five lakes around Elmalı and eight lakes in Korkuteli have totally dried.”

The situation is not different in the region between Acıgöl and the province of Burdur. “Five small lakes there have dried and six lakes witness a huge loss of water,” he said.

He rules out global warming and the climate crisis as the main causes behind the drying up of the lakes.

“They are totally human errors, and the overuse of water is leading the list of errors,” he added.