Ankara
Turkish Minister of Forestry and Water Works Veysel Eroglu stated that during the rule of Justice and Development (AK) Party, the amount of afforested areas increased to 470,000-500,000 hectares annually which had earlier been 70,000 thousand hectares.
Eroglu stated that although the target was 2.3 million hectares of afforestation, they reached a record with an arbour of 2.4 million hectares within the scope of National Afforestation Mobilization.
Saying that AK Party extended the planted area, Eroglu told AA in an exclusive interview that the incidents in Taksim Gezi Park sit-in started with an environmental sensibility, which turned into a devastation later on with the participation of some provokers. He added that they always appreciated the sensibilities about environment and trees, which was part of democracy, but not those who harmed environment and ran wild.
"We, especially give importance to environment. We put importance to afforestation. Amongst the governments since now, we are the most environmentalist government. I proved it with numbers. There are the numbers, indeed," Eroglu noted. "We built the first solid waste aside and medical waste collecting and burning service areas, compost service areas and even areas to produce electric from landfill gas. There were wild storages before us. Istanbul is a world city ever after. It's water is amongst the best metropolitan waters in the world. It's air is the cleanest one, cleaner than Paris' air. Green areas increased. Besides, the solid waste aside and medical waste collecting service areas were founded. In short, Istanbul resembled to green".
Eroglu also stated that they were going to build two forests in Istanbul, one to be placed on the Asian side's Elmali dam and the other in the European side's Alibey dam, which would be bigger than New York's Central Park, by saying, "These were not considered, but we did them."
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