Poor Urban Development Plan Boost Flood Risk on Turkey's Northern Coast

A man stands next to damaged vehicle after the flash floods in the northern town of Dereli in Giresun province, Turkey, August 24, 2020. Turkish Interior Ministry/Handout via REUTERS
A man stands next to damaged vehicle after the flash floods in the northern town of Dereli in Giresun province, Turkey, August 24, 2020. Turkish Interior Ministry/Handout via REUTERS
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Poor Urban Development Plan Boost Flood Risk on Turkey's Northern Coast

A man stands next to damaged vehicle after the flash floods in the northern town of Dereli in Giresun province, Turkey, August 24, 2020. Turkish Interior Ministry/Handout via REUTERS
A man stands next to damaged vehicle after the flash floods in the northern town of Dereli in Giresun province, Turkey, August 24, 2020. Turkish Interior Ministry/Handout via REUTERS

When Mahmut Talic left his small hardware shop one summer evening, its displays of tools, insulation supplies and window frames were all neatly in their places.

One hour later, floodwaters rampaged through the shop in the town of Dereli, near Turkey’s Black Sea coast, smashing the glass storefront, filling the shop with mud and sweeping its contents into the street.

“Everything is gone,” Talic, 28, told Reuters.

“I couldn’t get back to the shop that night because the rain was so heavy. But it’s a good thing I didn’t, or I’d be dead now.”

At least 11 people were killed when heavy rain, followed by flash floods and landslides, hit the province of Giresun last month.

Environmentalists and engineers have been warning for years about poorly planned urban development in the Black Sea’s coastal cities and in the thickly forested mountains that rise up steeply behind them.

Combined with the effects of climate change, they warn, this has left the rain-prone region with its population of more than 7 million highly vulnerable to floods, Reuters reported.

Four people are still missing after the storm in Dereli, which washed out or blocked dozens of roads and damaged hundreds of buildings.

“This is the first time I’ve seen such a flood,” Turkish Agriculture and Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli said while visiting the area after the disaster.

Just over a month earlier, six people had died in two days of storms further east in the region, in the provinces of Rize and Artvin.

“These kinds of disasters cannot occur because of one mistake,” said Mikdat Kadioglu, a meteorological engineer and disaster management expert at Istanbul Technical University.

“All the activities that destroy the area’s natural structure play a role.”

When Kadioglu was growing up in Macka, a mountain town in the Black Sea province of Trabzon, “the older people would tell the younger ones where to build their houses, the places where they would be safe from landslides or floods,” he recalled.

“But, once the government began constructing roads through the stream-beds, where it was cheaper and easier to build, people started putting their houses there too.”

Neither the ministry of agriculture and forestry nor the ministry of environment and urbanization responded to several requests for comment.

The Black Sea region began changing rapidly in the 1980s. Government subsidies were eliminated for agriculture and livestock husbandry, encouraging migration to the lowland urban centers.

In 1987, construction began on a new 540-km (336-mile) coastal highway from the city of Samsun to the border with Georgia.

Completed two decades later, the highway cut off access to the sea and facilitated additional development along the coast as well as on the stream-beds leading inland up into the mountains.

“Apartment buildings have been built in the yaylalar (upland mountain plateaus), with highways built up to them, covering the river valleys with asphalt and cement,” said Onder Algedik, a mechanical engineer and independent climate consultant.

According to a report by environmental group 350 Ankara, Turkey experienced 328 flood disasters in 2018, a sharp rise from 25 in 2000. During that same period, the amount of asphalt and concrete poured each year nationwide more than doubled.

Recent deluges in Turkey’s two largest cities, Istanbul and Ankara, have created surreal scenes over the past few years of water-logged subways, floating cars and people swimming across the street.

In the Black Sea region, environmental experts say the risks are compounded by the mountainous topography and the hundreds of dams and hydropower stations, quarries, mines and roads built there.

A project to connect the region’s ecologically fragile highlands with a 2,600-km (4,184-mile) highway has continued to move forward despite court rulings against it on environmental grounds, activists and local officials say.

Environmentalists have spoken out against the highway, saying such projects cause deforestation and soil erosion, contributing to the destructiveness of floods and landslides.

Trees help to soak up rainwater, shield the land from heavy rainfall and hold soil in place, they note.



Despite Sharp Decline, Inflation Remains a Sore Point for Harris

Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a speech at The Alan Horwitz "Sixth Man" Center, a youth basketball facility, as she campaigns in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a speech at The Alan Horwitz "Sixth Man" Center, a youth basketball facility, as she campaigns in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
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Despite Sharp Decline, Inflation Remains a Sore Point for Harris

Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a speech at The Alan Horwitz "Sixth Man" Center, a youth basketball facility, as she campaigns in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a speech at The Alan Horwitz "Sixth Man" Center, a youth basketball facility, as she campaigns in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

For six months or so in 2021, as vaccines paved an economic reopening from the COVID-19 pandemic and fresh waves of federal benefits flowed to household bank accounts, President Joe Biden's administration reaped the benefit with an approval rating pinned above 50%.
It has been mired around 40% ever since, with the scarring impact of subsequently high inflation still cited by voters as a major issue even though the pace of price increases has declined, wages and the economy continue to grow, and the jobless rate remains low, Reuters said.
As good as the economy might seem across most major indicators, inflation that peaked at 9% more than two years ago has been hard for Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to outrun, and given former President and Republican candidate Donald Trump a cudgel that remains effective on the eve of the election even as inflation has dwindled to 2.4%.
"Inflation has not faded as an issue," said Justin McCarthy, a spokesperson for Gallup, the polling giant that fields monthly surveys that include an open-ended question, without lists or prompts, of what respondents feel is the "most important" issue facing them. Those citing inflation as the most serious issue has fallen from highs of around 20% during the peak inflation surge in 2022 to around 15% in recent polls, but that remains double the historic norm and is part of broader concern about the economy cited by more than 40% of respondents.
It's an area where Trump continues to hold a polling edge despite Harris' pledges to address issues like high housing costs or the "price gouging" she cites as a cause of high prices in the grocery aisle.
In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, 68% of respondents in seven swing states said the cost of living was "on the wrong track," and 61% said the same about the economy. Half said Trump had "a better plan, policy or approach" to managing the economy compared with 37% for Harris, while on inflation Trump was favored 47% to 34%.
In-person voting concludes on Tuesday, with polls showing an overall tight race between Harris and Trump nationally and in the battleground states seen as determining the outcome.
The Biden administration and later the Harris campaign recognized early on the problem inflation posed.
Biden named one of his signature pieces of legislation the "Inflation Reduction Act," though much of it focused on subsidies for electric vehicles and clean energy. As rising rent and housing prices emerged as a particularly acute issue, they launched proposals that included capping rent increases, tax incentives for affordable housing construction, and downpayment help for first-time home buyers.
What they didn't publicize so much is how sticky a problem it would be for the households living through it.
Attitudes improved somewhat as inflation began to ease last year, but the change only went so far.
'UNAMBIGUOUSLY NEGATIVE'
Solutions have been offered by both campaigns, but inflation, the responsibility first and foremost of the Federal Reserve through its management of interest rates and credit conditions, is difficult for elected officials to address.
Republican President Richard Nixon tried the direct route by freezing wage and price increases for 90 days in 1971 and establishing a government panel to approve them after that. Inflation was 4.3% at the time and did fall below 4% in the summer of 1972 as Nixon campaigned for reelection.
But it soared that fall as the controls were eased, and following an embargo by Arab oil exporters in 1973 exceeded 12% by the end of 1974.
When inflation started rising during his term in office, Democratic President Jimmy Carter used a major address in 1978 to announce plans to limit government spending and call for voluntary wage and price limits from business. By the middle of his losing reelection bid against Republican Ronald Reagan prices were rising more than 14% annually.
After two recessions, a period of punishing interest rates imposed by the Fed and its firmer commitment to inflation control, price increases gradually settled close to the 2% level the central bank eventually adopted as its official target - and stayed there until the COVID-19 pandemic.
Economists have sparred over the exact reasons inflation took off beginning in 2021, and if that could have been prevented. But they generally agree on the broad mix. As the pandemic limited spending on in-person services, it also created deep backlogs in the manufacture and delivery of the goods, from bikes to appliances to automobiles, that were suddenly in high demand as a result of roughly $5 trillion in stimulus from the federal government.
The pandemic support began under Trump; Biden added more in a move some economists feel may have supercharged demand beyond what was needed.
It is a debate being litigated in hindsight and in the shadow of a health crisis that lingered long enough - new COVID variants were still suppressing in-person gatherings through 2021 - to even implicate the Fed. Inflation took off in 2021; the central bank did not raise rates until March 2022.
What doesn't seem in doubt is the impact on the public mood, something that shouldn't be a surprise.
Surveys about inflation have been consistent in finding that price shocks register deeply and are not quickly forgotten.
"Inflation significantly complicates household decision-making, which is seen as its most critical consequence," researchers Alberto Binetti of Bocconi University and Francesco Nuzzi and Stefanie Stantcheva of Harvard University concluded from the results of an online survey of 2,264 people conducted between March and May. "This complexity affects daily economic choices" and adds to economic uncertainty.
Nor do people seem to care much if, as has happened recently and Democrats have tried to emphasize, wages rise faster than prices.
"Inflation is perceived as an unambiguously negative phenomenon without any potential positive economic correlates," they found, with people expecting it to be fixed "without significant trade-offs."