While it’s ‘fashionable to blame climate change’, that’s not the only thing turning Türkiye’s great lakes to dust

Mountaineer and environmentalist Bayram Çini has been hiking around Lake Akşehir, one of Türkiye’s largest lakes, since 1995.

It was once a sprawling deep blue expanse, and home to more than 60 types of birds and countless fish species, some of which only existed here.

“In fact, the value given to the lake cannot be explained,” Mr Çini said, adding that it was the centre of local industry, culture and even folk tales.

But this year, it’s no longer a lake.

After watching Akşehir slowing dry up for years, Mr Çini was horrified on his most recent visit to find nothing but a huge plane of cracked earth scattered with dead birds.

And it’s not the only one. Mr Çini said four of the great tectonic lakes of this vast region known as Türkiye’s Lake District have dried up and four more have receded to critically low levels.

In a study published in the journal Science last week, a team of international researchers reported that more than half of the world’s large lakes and reservoirs had shrunk since the early 1990s due to climate change, unregulated water use and dam construction.

The report, which used satellite measurements combined with climate and hydrological models, found “significant drying trends” in 53 per cent of the world’s natural lakes.

It said unsustainable human use and rising temperatures had driven lake levels down, resulting in the loss of billions of tons of water.

In Türkiye, which is almost entirely covered by three of the world’s critical biodiversity hotspots, experts say water loss is effecting endemic species, and impacting migratory bird numbers on a harrowing scale.

Across the country over the past 50 years, dozens of lakes as well as around 1.5 million hectares of wetland have dried up, sometimes taking entire species along with them, said Dr Çağan H Şekercioğlu, a Turkish professor of ecology, ornithology and conservation biology.

“A lot of species are going extinct, especially Turkey’s endemic freshwater fish, and people don’t even notice,” he told the ABC, using Türkiye’s previous English name which was officially changed last year.

Last year, Dr Şekercioğlu said he travelled to the Lake District to film a documentary about a species of fish that was endemic to one particular lake.

Instead of a lake, they found “a field covered in concrete, rubble and garbage”.

Of the 96 countries where he has worked, he said the state of Türkiye’s wetlands “are by far the worst”, and while it’s “fashionable to blame climate change”, the main culprit is actually unsustainable water use and draining for agriculture and development.

“Climate change often just delivers the last blow.”

Türkiye’s Lake District turning to dust

Back at Lake Akşehir, Mr Çini explained that for months birds that once lived or migrated there have been dying off as the waters receded.

When he first saw scores of dead young mallard ducks in December, he said “he couldn’t breathe”.

“Seeing thousands of mallards dead really affected me deeply,” he said.

Mr Çini began an investigation into the cause of the deaths with the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change, but no toxic or chemical substances were found.

He believes, being the end of the breeding season, the young ducks could not fly well enough yet to make it to nearby Lake Eber, which has also severely receded.

Mr Çini said illegal damming of streams and unregulated use of underground water supplies for agriculture was fast pushing the area towards “desertification”.

“Dams are built on every stream bed and we dump our waste into this area.”

But locals say small dams and irrigation are vital for their farmlands, while more than 700 hydro-electric facilities — some of which have flooded villages and natural habits while drying up lakes and river downstream — generate about 17 per cent of Turkey’s electricity.

For 30 years, Mr Çini and others have advocated for change, but have instead witnessed the slow death of their beloved lakes, and now much of the plant and animal life of the region is “on the verge of extinction”. 

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Türkiye’s ‘damming craze’ reaches the ‘wild east’

On the other side of Türkiye, Dr Şekercioğlu and his small team of workers and volunteers are fighting to save Lake Kuyucuk from the same fate.

Dr Şekercioğlu grew up in the suburbs of Istanbul, playing in the wetlands nearby and dreaming of becoming a zoologist.

While growing up, he saw those wetlands drained and developed, and that loss inspired a lifetime dedicated to conservation.

The now 47-year-old went on to study biology, ecology and ornithology at Harvard and then Stanford before returning for a research project on butterflies in Türkiye’s “untamed and wild east”.

“And since we discovered eight [butterfly] species new to science we realised that a number of species probably went extinct without ever being discovered, so that was really eye opening.”

This inspired the creation of the KuzeyDoğa Society — a conservation group founded by Dr Şekercioğlu in 2008 to preserve the critical wildlife habits of the east.

After recording 313 bird species in this “globally critical” region, the team saw the levels of Lake Kuyucuk begin to drop due to ill-planned and illegal blocking of all five streams feeding the lake for agricultural use.

Complaints to local government only led to attempts to stop the team’s conservation work and “silence them”.

By 2018, this once 230-hectare lake was “completely gone”.

‘It’s not too late’

“To save the lake from disappearing permanently, we had to provide it with emergency water,” Dr Şekercioğlu said.

They began pumping underground water to replenish part of the lake, effectively putting the region’s ecology on “life support”.

“Meanwhile, we worked with the government to convince local villagers to take down two of the smaller dams.”

In December last year, they had a breakthrough, receiving a court order to take down the largest illegal dam.

“We were so excited,” he recalled, but the local farmers who say they need the water for their livestock and crops, simply rented a bulldozer and rebuilt it within weeks.

The fight continues as the team face threats for their conservation efforts.

In the meantime, what remains of the lake is a wet marshland with some water in the centre.

“It’s no longer like the lake it used to be,” he said, adding that the loss in bird numbers was staggering.

“In the fall when it’s like the most important time, it used to have 40,000 to 45,000 birds and now it’s got a few thousand.”

But he believes there is still time to save Kuyucuk and other disappearing lakes across the world.

“People simply blame climate change instead of solving the human problem. They say, ‘oh, it’s because of climate change that the forests are burning. It’s climate change that is drying the lakes. What can we do?'”

But he says in reality, there’s a lot that can be done through efficient water usage.

“If the government enforces existing laws about water usage and damming it can be reversed,” he said, adding that agriculture doesn’t need to suffer.

In recent years, The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry has stated that models were being created to reduce water use and promote crops with low water consumption.

Dr Şekercioğlu said by some estimates, a simple change to drip irrigation could reduce agricultural water consumption in Türkiye by up to 90 per cent.

But currently, most of the country’s irrigation is via open channels, resulting in huge evaporation loss, and if nothing changes, he said, in the coming years “we will lose dozens more lakes and wetlands”.

Türkiye’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change did not respond to requests for comment.