The Fight for Dirt: TEMA

turkey

It’s the same vicious cycle that takes place in many drylands of the world. In rural Turkey, agriculture is the ticket out of poverty for many people. But farmers often end up overexploiting marginal soils. Erosion and land degradation are the inevitable consequences. But in the fight against land degradation, Turkey has an ace up its sleeve through the work of the Turkish Foundation for Combating Soil Erosion, for Reforestation and the Protection of Natural Habitats (TEMA).

TEMA, the largest environmental NGO in Turkey, tackles the problem of land degradation in various ways, including policy advocacy, legal and educational campaigns, and practical work on the ground.

TEMA has filed or has been involved in over 150 legal cases with a 75 percent success rate of the cases that went to a verdict. It has applied the power of civil mobilization to protect the land. In a historic case, it gathered a million signatures in support of a law that TEMA had drafted to protect the soil. This is significant given that at least 24 billion tons of fertile soil are lost through soil erosion every year according to scientists. That is a loss of 3 tons of soil per person per year, estimated in monetary terms to be US$70 per person per year or US$490 billion per year for the global population. This achievement earned TEMA the second runner-up position for the 2012 Land for Life Award of US$30,000.

Through its legal cases, TEMA prevented a total of more than 70,000 hectares of fertile agricultural land from being sealed for tourist sites or power plants. Influencing national legislation and court rulings on environmental issues is at the core of TEMA’s advocacy campaigns. Success is rooted in its varied approaches that combine people power with practical work. People power is built through educating those who have a multiplier effect in the society, such as the teachers, clergy, police and others, and students from preschool to university, as well as through publishing books and teaching materials.

TEMA has over 475,000 volunteers and over 100 volunteer scientists and legal advisors. About 2.5 million people have attended TEMA’s education programs. TEMA General Manager, Serdar Sarigul, says:

Our volunteers are our most important asset. They help us to communicate our message to the public. TEMA talks about the issues of soil erosion and land degradation in a language that the public can understand. The volunteers can also launch their own initiatives in their respective regions. This means that TEMA is always relevant to local people’s current concerns.

TEMA’s strength also comes from its practical experience. It has implemented more than 100 demonstration projects on sustainable rural development, reforestation, biodiversity conservation, and on combating desertification countrywide. Many of them show that sustainable land management does not have to be overly complicated. An example is the saffron project in Çütlük, a semiarid upland region close to Turkey’s borders with Syria and Iraq. Here, soils suffer from cotton monocropping, which demands frequent irrigation and leads to increased salinity and loss of nutrients in an already waterscarce area. With experts from Harran University, TEMA explored the viability of commercial saffron cultivation and then reintroduced it into the area. Saffron requires only 10 percent of the irrigation water needed to grow cotton. Last year, TEMA celebrated its 20th anniversary under the theme, “Soil Means Life.” It is using the prize money from the Land for Life Award to raise awareness and promote special publications and seminars conducted by leading environmental experts.

Web site: http://www.tema.org.tr

Climate Change