Saving İskenderun Bay: A doctor, a lawyer and their legal campaign against polluters
ADANA – Dr. Sadun Bölükbaşı is pensive as he looks out at the Mediterranean Sea from İskenderun Bay, a thumb-shaped gulf between the southern provinces of Adana and Hatay. He thinks he knows why the latest Greenpeace report identified this area as having the worst air quality in Turkey.
Bölükbaşı is a family doctor and farmer from Erzin, a hub for Turkey’s citrus production in Hatay. He took over the family business from his grandfather, who harvested tangerines. But he became an outspoken environmentalist when he realized pollution was posing an invisible threat to his livelihood.
“We are not [just] talking about the trees, flowers and insects,” he told Turkey recap.
Now the president of the Association to Protect the Environment and Consumers (ÇETKO), Bölükbaşı says all of İskenderun Bay is suffering. There is pollution in the soil, the air and the water all along the bay. The region’s main income source is agriculture, and with the high contamination levels in the soil, everyone is affected.
Not one for inaction, Bölükbaşı joined forces with environmental lawyer İsmail Hakkı Atal, and for decades the two have opened legal cases against domestic and international companies responsible for contaminating some of south Turkey’s most productive farm lands.
Both are in their 50s, live in Adana and they communicate with each other by email to build cases aimed at preventing further environmental degradation in their region.
“We’ve been fighting against pollutants in the region since the early 2000s,” Bölükbaşı said, adding they began by targeting thermal plants and through legal means “were able to stop the construction of more than 30 coal plants.”
Taken together, legal interventions by Bölükbaşı and Atal stopped 12 plants from being built, and 22 additional plants were denied the necessary licenses for operation.
Battle against coal
In the mid-2000s, Bölükbaşı and other environmentalists filed mass permit revocation cases against companies that were granted licenses or pre-licenses to open thermal power plants on the bay. They won and the licenses were revoked.
Atal, who volunteers as a lawyer for local environmental groups in the eastern Mediterranean, told Turkey recap the strategy was the first of its kind, and represented a new technique to legally handle many cases at once.
In 2015, the French state-run Engie also canceled a planned 1,320-megawatt coal plant project in İskenderun following coordinated protests from locals and environmental groups as well as a letter scripted by Bölükbaşı to then-French Pres. Francois Hollande.
Had Bölükbaşı and Atal, along with environmental groups, not been persistent in their fight, nearly 40 coal-fired additional thermal power plants would be sitting on the İskenderun Bay, dotting a span of about 200 km across the northeastern Mediterranean.
Instead, four coal plants are currently operating in the region. One is in Yumurtalık in the south of Adana and is owned predominantly by the German company Steag. Just 1.8 km away, the second is the EMBA Hunutlu Power Plant and stands as the largest Chinese foreign direct investment in Turkey to date.
The third, Atlas Enerji, is in İskenderun and is run by the Turkish company Diler Holding. The fourth, Tufanbeyli Lignite, is located in northern Adana and is operated by EnerjiSA, a subsidiary of Turkey’s Sabancı Holding.
Environmentalists continue their calls for these four plants to be shut down immediately as they release significant amounts of unhealthy particulate matter into the air.
Particulate matter (PM) consists of particles in the air, such as dust, airborne bacteria and coal particles from power plants. Specifically, PM2.5 and PM10 are the two most publicized types of PM and “affect people more than any other pollutant”, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
These plants “greatly impact the PM2.5 and PM10 exerted. It’s a scientific fact,” Bölükbaşı said.
Exposure to carcinogenic PM10, WHO claims, is “associated with morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.” Coal plants are a predominant generator of PM10, and their continued operation conflicts with Turkey’s vow to reach net zero emissions by 2053.
The total population of the regions of Adana, Mersin, Hatay and Osmaniye province is nearly six million. According to an air quality and health impacts report published by the Finland-based non-profit Centre For Research on Energy and Clean Air, CREA, the impacts of the four coal plants affect all these regions and extends to Cyprus, some 270 kilometers away.
The problem with Hunutlu
In 2017, when plans were made to construct the Chinese-run Hunutlu plant in the Adana district of Yumurtalık, Bölükbaşı and Atal requested an expert health report. A team from Çukurova University in Adana was called in to measure the PM10 levels in Yumurtalık and found the area had already exceeded healthy risk levels.
An additional environmental concern arose from the proposed location of the plant – Sugözü Beach, a nesting beach of green sea turtles, which have been laying eggs in the region for millions of years.
The Eastern Mediterranean Environment Platform (DACE), along with their volunteer lawyer Atal and Bölükbaşı, the platform’s speaker, included their concerns in a report and received thousands of signatures to stop the plant construction in order to protect the turtles.
The plant owners said they would address the concerns about the turtles, but as stated by Atal: “It was revealed by the experts that none of the measures that were said to be taken to protect the turtles were adequate and realistic.”
Despite the public protest, the $2.17 billion Hunutlu thermal plant was built, disregarding the expert statements warning of the plant’s risks and threats to public health and the environment.
The plant was constructed and became operational just before China’s 2022 pledge to stop building and financing coal plants overseas.
"Even after China declared that it’s quitting coal, Hunutlu is still working here,” Bölükbaşı said.
The earthquake’s lasting impact
Air quality in the region has also deteriorated due to extensive rubble piles and dust from the Feb. 6, 2023 earthquakes. According to Greenpeace’s Mediterranean report, residents of the port city of İskenderun breathed in polluted air exceeding the PM10 limit for 235 days of the past year.
The same report found that in Turkey’s top five regions with the highest level of PM10, three were impacted by the earthquakes, which killed more than 50,000 and displaced over 3.3 million across 11 provinces.
One of the disaster’s most catastrophic impacts on the environment has been the debris left in its aftermath.
The UNDP estimated the debris generated by the collapse of thousands of buildings across the region to range between 116 million to 210 million tons. However, a research paper by Artvin Çoruh University estimated the amount of construction and demolition waste was much higher – at 350 to 580 million tons.
The İstanbul branch of the TMMOB Chamber of Environmental Engineers published a report stating earthquake debris was dumped in wetlands, stream beds and olive groves without taking any precautionary measures against leakage or the spread of contaminants within the rubble, such as asbestos and other toxic chemicals.
“This shows that the additional pollution caused by the debris removal can’t be tolerated as all stations in these three cities have surpassed yearly limits,” Gökhan Ersoy, a Greenpeace Climate and Energy expert said in a press release.
To understand the degree to which safety regulations were circumvented in the post-quake rubble removal process, one would need to visit the region and observe conditions with their own eyes.
Debris piles remain open pits that kick up asbestos-laced dust in strong winds. Also during the transport of debris to such sites, dump trucks often moved rubble without covering their cargo loads, spreading the same dust throughout rural areas and impacting local agriculture.
The fight goes on
While speaking of regional contamination, Bölükbaşı highlighted the CREA report and a study by Prof. Necat Ağca at Mustafa Kemal University in Hatay that recorded heavy metals above permissible limits in the different soil samples between Sarıseki, İskenderun and Dörtyol, Hatay.
He felt that after spending many nights poring over environmental impact reports and devising solutions, they had gathered enough evidence to prove in court that the region is being environmentally degraded.
The introduction of new pollutants is unacceptable in terms of public health and the economy, Bölükbaşı said, adding he believed “the health cost” outweighed the profits from coal.
In his Adana office packed with red, blue and yellow files, Atal talks about environmental success stories while sipping linden tea.
“We couldn’t have done it without the support of the local environmental groups,” Atal said.
But the fight goes on. Atal had just returned from the site of the gold mine disaster in Erzincan province, where nine miners were lost in a landslide. He had recently sued the mining company for wanting to expand, he explained to Turkey recap in a worn-out voice.
Atal can often be found on such environmental assignments. Last summer, he took part in the resistance to the destruction of Akbelen Forest, a project aiming to expand a coal mine in southwestern Muğla. He was there for eight months, sleeping in his small RV and spending the days with locals.
In 2019, when a Canadian gold company razed 350,000 trees in the Ida Mountains in Turkey’s northwest, he was also there.
Atal blames capitalism and the policies of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which he says intentionally undermine people’s right to live in a clean, sustainable environment. A self-defined patriot, he thinks some governments intentionally “weaken the rural population” by depriving them of their livelihoods or, even worse, their lives.
“Thirteen of the fishermen I represented have died. Many, of cancer,” Atal said, referring to an ongoing case he is litigating on behalf of fishermen from Yumurtalık, Adana.
In the case against the Hunutlu coal plant, he noted cancer rates in Yumurtalık significantly increased from 2008 to 2015. Official cancer statistics have not been released since 2019.
Emily Johnson edited this article and contributed additional reporting from İstanbul.
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