The Turkish Mediterranean Coast

The project area straddles the meeting of two Ecologically and Biologically Sensitive Areas (EBSAs) in the Mediterranean Basin: the Central Aegean Sea and the North East Levantine Sea.

Dotted throughout this project area are important pockets of intact seagrass beds and coralligenous habitats, which provide a home for some of the Mediterranean’s rarest and most iconic species including monk seals, sandbar sharks, loggerhead turtles and sperm whales, important commercial fish species such as dusky grouper and bluefin tuna, and migratory sea birds.

Project context and opportunity

Despite its ecological interest, the Mediterranean Basin is vulnerable to irrecoverable habitat and species loss. As global sea temperatures rise, an increasing number of invasive marine species are entering the Mediterranean from the Red Sea via the Suez Canal – 900 invasive species have already been recorded. The number of native species is dwindling as unregulated fishing activity and unsustainable tourism erode ecosystem functionality and damage the habitat on which these species depend. These activities are also reducing numbers of the predatory species that currently help keep invasive species in check.

Local communities have already been seriously affected by these changes to marine life; over the last 15 years, there has been a sharp decrease in catch size and number of target species, much to the detriment of the livelihoods of nearly 70,000 people living in the area who depend on an intact marine ecosystem.

A pilot marine habitat restoration project in nearby Gökova Bay has, however, yielded exciting results. In just five years, there has been significant recovery of habitat and fish stocks, an increase in fishing incomes, reduced abundance of invasive species and the return of predatory sandbar sharks and Mediterranean monk seals. This project is scaling up this successful model along approximately 700km of vulnerable Turkish Mediterranean coast.