Türkiye

Historical emissions for 1990-2021 are taken from the common reporting format tables in Türkiye’s 2023 National Inventory Report (Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, 2023). To estimate 2022 emissions, we apply GHG sectoral growth rates for 2022 from the Turkish Statistical Institute’s (TURKSTAT) to 2021 historical emissions for energy and industry, agriculture and waste sectors (Turkish Statistical Institute, 2024).

The updated NDC of 2023 continues to use the same BAU scenario including LULUCF as the first NDC and INDC (Government of the Republic of Türkiye, 2023). The CAT excludes LULUCF from its calculations. Since the updated NDC does not provide projections for LULUCF, we assume that the LULUCF sink is the same as what is reported in Türkiye’s 5th Biennial Report ‘with measures’ scenario which corresponded to the mitigation scenario from Türkiye’s first NDC (2021)(Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Environment Urbanisation and Climate Change, 2023). We calculated the new 41% reduction target excluding LULUCF using these values.

In the previous update from 2023, we used a method for quantifying the current policy projections that relied heavily on the ‘With Measures’ (WM) scenario developed by Türkiye for its 2015 INDC with a historic base year of 2012. Türkiye has not updated its WM scenario since then and by its own admission the WM scenario does not reflect the results of its current policies and measures (Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Environment Urbanisation and Climate Change, 2023). It is working on updated the WM scenario and is expected to share the updated scenario in the Ninth National Communication. We have therefore chosen to no longer use the WM scenario and construct our current policy projections based on the best available sources.

To construct the current policy projections, we use a sectoral and gas-by-gas approach. We start by applying the historical ratio from 2021 of CO₂, CH₄, N₂0, and F-gases in the Energy, Industry, Agriculture, and Waste sectors to the estimated GHG emissions for each sector in 2022 (Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, 2023).

For the upper bound of our current policies projections, we apply the Baseline Scenario’s growth rate for total CO₂ from the Istanbul Policy Centre’s report “Turkey’s Decarbonization Pathway: Net Zero in 2050” (Şahin et al., 2021). We apply growth rates for non-CO₂ emissions from the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (US EPA) projections to each non-CO2 gas in energy and industry (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2019). For the agriculture and waste sectors, we apply US EPA’s total non-CO₂ growth rate for the respective agriculture and waste sectors to all gases in those sectors in 2022. While the US EPA estimates are for non-CO₂ emissions only, the amount of CO₂ emitted by the agriculture and waste sectors is so small as to be non-existent, so we use the growth rates for the sector as a whole.

For the lower bound of our current policies projections, we use the World Energy Outlook (WEO) (IEA, 2023). We subtract the EU’s total energy CO₂ in the State Policies Scenario (STEPS) from Europe’s STEPS total energy CO₂ to get other-Europe total energy CO₂ which includes other countries than just Türkiye. Then we apply the growth rate of STEPS other-Europe energy CO₂ to historical CO₂ from energy in 2022. For industry CO₂, we apply the growth rate STEPS other-Europe industry CO₂ to historical CO₂ from industry in 2022. For non-CO₂ from energy and industry as well as all gases in agriculture and waste, we follow the same method as indicated above.

Finally, we sum all the individual gas projections and sectoral projections together to have an upper and lower bound for all GHG emissions under current policy projections.

To quantify Türkiye’s 2053 emissions, we assume that Türkiye maintains the LULUCF sink of -70 MtCO₂ in 2030 as indicated in its 5th Biennial Report ‘With Measures’ scenario through 2053 (Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Environment Urbanisation and Climate Change, 2023). This means that emissions from other sectors would have to be reduced to 70 MtCO₂ in 2053.

The CAT uses Global Warming Potential (GWP) values from the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) for all its figures and time series. Assessments completed prior to December 2018 (COP24) used GWP values from the Second Assessment Report (SAR).