Today, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Türkiye and Directorate of Climate Change of the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change took a major step forward in local climate action as part of their EU-funded project that aims to support communities in the face of the effects of climate change. At the one-day Conference in Ankara, the Directorate of Climate Change and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK) signed a protocol to render high-resolution climate projections for Türkiye, modelling its climate until the year 2100.

The project will deliver climate projections at an unprecedented 3-kilometer resolution over Türkiye domain, a vast improvement over the 10-kilometer resolution of previous studies in Türkiye. This higher resolution will provide much more detailed information about the potential impacts of climate change across the country.

To solve the complex physical equations that form the basis of climate models with such high resolution, substantial computing resources are necessary. TÜBİTAK will provide significant computational resources for the calculations involved in the initiative’s studies. This includes 108 million core hour processing power and a massive 4 Petabyte storage area. Additionally, TÜBİTAK’s computer resources, worth €1.7 million, will support the project’s high-resolution climate projection efforts.

The refined climate projections generated by this project will play a critical role in guiding climate-related decision making in Türkiye. These projections will inform 12 vulnerability and risk assessments that will be conducted across the country's nomenclature of territorial units for statistics regions.

After conducting vulnerability and risk assessments, the project will prepare local climate change action plans and develop interactive online tools to enhance local decision-making and implementation capacity. It will also organize training programs and awareness-raising activities, and provide technical assistance through the EU-Türkiye Climate Change Grant Program.

Overall, this project represents a major leap forward in Türkiye's efforts to understand and address the challenges of climate change at the local level and aims to empower local action in a context of increased vulnerability and urgent necessity. By generating detailed climate projections and integrating precise, data-driven risk assessments into planning, the project aims to develop effective climate policies, anticipate and mitigate the impacts of current and future climate change, and ensure a more sustainable future for the country.