Turkey's Watershed Rehabilitation Programme — Anatolia Watershed Rehabilitation Project to TULIP

Turkey's Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, through its General Directorate of Forestry (OGM), has run watershed rehabilitation support to rural communities since 2004 under the World Bank/GEF-financed Anatolia Watershed Rehabilitation Project (AWRP, 2004-2012/13, following an earlier 1993-2001 Eastern Anatolia precursor), and continues today under the Turkey Resilient Landscape Integration Project (TULIP, 2021-present). Rather than cash-per-hectare payments, the program delivers in-kind and technical support — tree saplings, irrigation and cultivation technology, solar water heaters to reduce fuelwood demand, and financing for community-designed 'micro-catchment investment plans' — to farming households in erosion-prone Black Sea and Central Anatolian catchments.

AWRP combined a US$15.7 million World Bank loan with a US$7 million GEF grant (about US$45.4 million total with co-financing) across roughly 28 microcatchments. World Bank results reporting attributes to the project a 77% increase in vegetation cover above baseline, soil fertility gains of over 20% on sloping land, average household income increases of 53% in target areas, and adoption of improved practices by over 30% of farmers (60% for manure management), alongside measurable nutrient-load reductions into Black Sea tributaries. TULIP, a $135 million World Bank credit signed in 2021, extends the model to the Bolaman river basin (158,000 ha) and Çekerek river basin (876,000 ha), targeting roughly 90,000 direct beneficiaries including 13,000 forest-village households and 20,000 farmers receiving support for sustainable agriculture, afforestation and erosion control.

The evidence base has real limits. No independent, peer-reviewed evaluation of either project phase was located — the quantitative outcome figures come from World Bank/GEF self-reporting rather than third-party academic assessment, a bias worth noting explicitly. The support model is also in-kind/technical rather than a strict output-based cash PES contract, so it sits at the looser end of what 'payment for ecosystem services' typically means, and exact per-household disbursement rules were not confirmed in available sources. The program's main documented strength is its participatory, community-level micro-catchment planning model, explicitly credited by Turkish officials as a 'key success factor' and carried forward from AWRP into the newer TULIP phase — a genuine institutional-replication signal even without independent outcome verification.

Read the full analysis: https://www.ogm.gov.tr/tr/haberler/bolaman-ve-cekerek-havzasi-projeleri