THE EVALUATION OF VULNERABILITY TO SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE IN WEST AEGEAN TURKEY

Abstract

The settlements with high natural resources have become the subject of conservation policies to ensure sustainability of these resources. On the other hand they are exposed to anthropogenic pressures due to attractiveness of environmental resources and the needs of growing population. Environmental change has increased especially in coastal areas which provide various ecosystem services owing to many natural resources on a global scale in the last century. Continuing trend of consumption that restricts sustainability also leads to environmental degradation and pollution and increased problems in coastal areas caused by human-induced change. Against this pressure, vulnerability of settlements, the capacity and ability of social, economic, human, institutional, physical and environmental capital to adapt or cope with change is a major problem that needs to be addressed. In this context, this article aims to assess vulnerability against negative effects of socio-ecological changes in Izmir, Aydin and Mugla Provinces located in West Aegean Region of Turkey that comes to the fore with natural assets, on the other hand which is under pressure of population, tourism and urbanization. In this evaluation it's assumed that exposure level to social, environmental and resource use changes is (population growth, water usage, waste change, land use change) the main factor that determines sensitivity. With this assumption, adequacy of settlements adaptive capacity has been questioned in case the change trend continues. Furthermore, the calculated indexes of vulnerability are compared between settlements and the influence level of geographical location, demographic, physical and economic structure is examined with Decision Tree Model. Two basic conclusions have been drawn as a result of this analysis. The first one is despite the high adaptive capacity scores, coastal settlements, where tourism activities concentrated, and experienced intensive environmental losses. Secondly, the natural resource consumption increases with the presence of low adaptive capacity values in rural inland side of the region. Based on these conclusions, policy implications are suggested to ensure sustainability of settlements.