Facts in the “ICI Water Report”…
- 01.06.2024
- Archive
Last month, we had the pride of sharing a very important report that we have been working on for a long time. As Istanbul Chamber of Industry, with the awareness of our responsibility for a sustainable environment, for appreciating our natural resources and protecting them, we completed and announced the "Climate Change and Water Management: Industrial Sector Report" together with expert academics in the field.
The research was carried out under the coordination of Prof. Dr. İzzet Öztürk, the Honorary Member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences and one of the academicians of Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Environmental Engineering Department, and it was even more meaningful to announce this report at our May Assembly meeting titled "Evaluating the Agricultural Industry's More Effective and Efficient Contribution to Our Economy by Increasing the Integration between Agriculture and Industry with a Visionary View", where we hosted our Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, Mr. İbrahim Yumaklı.
You will find important findings, evaluations and solution suggestions from this comprehensive research in the following pages. However, I would like to briefly touch upon some of the findings that I find striking.
This scientific research predicts that temperature in our country will increase by 2.5°C to 5°C and the amount of precipitation will decrease by 10 to 20% in the next 50 years. Hydrological modeling studies predict that our water potential will decrease by 15 to 50 percent in the near future.
There are also very important findings and warnings about Istanbul in the report. For instance, it is expected that the efficiency of the resources supplying water to Istanbul will decrease by 30 percent by 2050. The research suggests that the total water potential in the 17 basins supplying water to Istanbul may decrease by around 8 percent and 12 percent in the near future.
The research also yielded important results regarding the use of water resources. As for the sectoral distribution of water use in Türkiye, 77 percent is used for agricultural irrigation, 12 percent for drinking and domestic use, and 11 percent for industrial needs.
There is a high potential for using urban wastewater for industrial water needs in our country, where the average per capita urban wastewater production is ~200 l/day per person.
As for the solution, academics give us many suggestions. First of all, I would like to share a few industry-related ones here: enabling water saving methods in industrial production processes, internal water management, purification and reuse of wastewater, separation of usable dissolved elements, development and dissemination of processes that collect water and do not create wastewater, and in this way, making chemical, paper and textile industries less dependent on water…
After sharing these extremely valuable results of our cooperation with the academy, I would like to share another good example of the importance we, as ICI, attach to university and industry cooperation, with a cooperation protocol we signed with the academic world last month.
Last month, we signed a protocol with ITU, aiming to improve cooperation between universities and industrial organizations, to increase Türkiye's R&D and innovation capacity, to help companies access to the qualified human resources needed in the industry, to support the industry to produce innovative products with high competitiveness and added value, and to train entrepreneurs who can be the industrialists of the future and bring them together with industrialists. Within the scope of this step we took together with our ITU President Mr. İsmail Koyuncu, ICI and ITU will cooperate for a comprehensive Center structure that will provide prototyping, user experience and consultancy services in the field of industrial design.
I hope that this cooperation protocol will be beneficial to our academic and industrial world, and wish you all a healthy and peaceful month.
Erdal Bahçıvan
Istanbul Chamber of Industry
Chairman of the Board of Directors