Türkiye makes local climate plans mandatory in all 81 provinces
A regulation that entered into force on 4 August 2026 requires every Turkish province to set up a governor-led climate coordination board and draw up an action plan covering the entire province. The Technical Guide the plans are supposed to follow has yet to be published.
In Türkiye, local climate planning has moved from being voluntary to being a legal obligation. The Regulation on Local Climate Change Action Plans and Provincial Climate Change Coordination Boards, prepared by the Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change, entered into force upon publication in the Official Gazette dated 4 August 2026, issue no. 33330.
The regulation is based on Article 7 of Climate Law no. 7552, which was adopted by the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye on 2 July 2025 and published in the Official Gazette of 9 July 2025. According to an assessment by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the regulation makes operational the law's provision requiring a coordination board to be established in every province.
Under the regulation, Local Climate Change Action Plans (known by their Turkish acronym YİDEP) will cover the entire territory of each province; they will address climate adaptation and greenhouse gas mitigation together and will be prepared with just transition requirements in mind. Until now, the plans drawn up by municipalities — mainly under the European Union's Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy — were confined to municipal boundaries; the new framework extends the scope to the provincial scale.
What the plans will contain
According to the Ministry's regulation, the plans will include a provincial climate risk assessment, adaptation targets, a provincial greenhouse gas inventory, an emission reduction target and actions. For each action, the responsible institution, implementation period, monitoring indicator, budget and possible source of financing will also be specified.
Coordination in preparing the plans will rest with the governor; in metropolitan provinces the metropolitan municipality, and in other provinces the provincial municipality and the provincial special administration, will run the process with the participation of stakeholders. This detail is based on the text of the regulation but has not been separately confirmed by an independent second institution.
The Provincial Climate Change Coordination Boards, to be established in all 81 provinces under the chairmanship of the governor, will include the local branches of public institutions, local authorities, chambers of commerce and industry, professional organisations, universities and, where necessary, civil society organisations.
The critical date: 31 December 2027
Under the transitional provisions, the boards must be set up by 31 December 2026, and the first plans — covering the 2028-2032 period — must be finalised by board decision by 31 December 2027. The Ministry may extend this deadline by up to one year. Provinces that already had a climate action plan before the regulation are also required to align their existing plans with the new provisions.
Implementation will be monitored through an electronic system called E-YİDEP. Climate risk data, the provincial greenhouse gas inventory and the status of actions will be uploaded to the system annually; the plans will be made public on the Climate Portal and updated every five years. According to UNDP, technical support for developing the system will be provided under the "EU Partnership for Local Climate Action in Türkiye" project, run by the European Union and UNDP.
As reported by Anadolu Agency, one of the stated reasons for the regulation is to have the plans prepared using a common methodology and a standard framework, and to establish a planning infrastructure that is comparable and traceable across provinces.
The missing link
The Technical Guide that is to serve as the basis for preparing the plans, however, has not yet been published. UNDP notes that the 81 provinces are expected to begin preparing their plans once the guide is completed. Because the publication timetable for the guide is unknown, how realistic the end-2027 deadline is remains an open question for now.
Preparations are not starting entirely from scratch. Before the regulation, the YİDEP Technical Framework and Applied Training Programme was carried out in pilot provinces; Elazığ and Isparta were among them. The programme covered climate projections, risk assessment methods, greenhouse gas inventory calculation and urban climate finance. The draft regulation was also discussed at workshops in December 2024 and February 2025 attended by public institutions, local authorities, academia and civil society, and was then opened to institutional comment.
The number of pilot provinces, however, is inconsistent across sources: the project website refers to five provinces, while an official from Isparta Municipality said there were six. The full list of pilot provinces could not be verified.
The real significance of the regulation is this: the centre of gravity for implementing climate policy is shifting to the provincial scale. By the end of 2027, all 81 provinces will have to produce a provincial greenhouse gas inventory and a climate risk assessment; that technical capacity currently exists in only a limited number of metropolitan cities. Whether local authorities will be given additional funding or staff support for the inventory and risk work, and whether administrative sanctions are foreseen if the obligation is not met, could not be established from the sources available.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by an editor before publication.
