A COMPARISON FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY PERFORMANCES OF THE TURKISH METROPOLITANS’

Year 2019, Volume: 6 Issue: 2, 313 - 321, 28.02.2019

Yağmur Kara

Abstract

Since 1950’s Turkey had to face with rapid urbanization caused by
population growth and migration. Therefore, like many other developing
countries, country has been experiencing environmental problems. The spread of
residential areas transformed forests and agricultural lands into urban,
increased water consumption and air pollution enhanced the stress on ecosystem.
The objective of this study is to measure urban environmental sustainability of
densely populated cities in Turkey and rank their environmental performances.
With this aim an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model is proposed since AHP
is an efficient method in complex decision making processes. Five indicators
such as; particulate equivalent, forest area, drawn water, wastewater
discharged and, wastes are employed in the model. The results indicate that
Bursa has the highest environmental sustainability score. It is followed by
İzmir, Adana, Kocaeli, Mersin, İstanbul and Antalya. The lowest rated cities are
Konya, Ankara and Gaziantep. Besides, there exist a positive relationship
between environmental performances of the metropolitans and income.

Keywords

Environmental Sustainability, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Sustainability, Sustainable Cities, Multi-Criteria Decision Making, Urban Sustainability

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