Sustainable Development in Türkiye

• Sustainable development in Türkiye is a comprehensive approach integrating economic growth, environmental protection, and social inclusion aligned with the UN SDGs.
• Empirical methods, including composite indices, ARDL models, PCA, and clustering, rigorously quantify regional disparities and policy trade-offs.
• Policy strategies emphasize renewable energy transition, infrastructure upgrades, and green defense to reconcile globalization with environmental sustainability.

Sustainable development in Türkiye encompasses a multidimensional policy and analytic field, integrating economic growth, environmental stewardship, social inclusion, and institutional reforms. It reflects both national strategies and commitments to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDGs 7 (affordable and clean energy), 8 (decent work and economic growth), 10 (reduced inequalities), and 13 (climate action). Recent empirical literature has leveraged composite indices, ARDL models, and multi-criteria decision-making frameworks to quantify trade-offs, regional disparities, and the effectiveness of policy instruments.

1. Measurement and Indices of Sustainable Development

The Sustainable Development Index (SDI) operationalizes Türkiye’s progress towards the SDGs by aggregating 17 targets—spanning economic, social, and environmental pillars—into a normalized composite score on a 0–100 scale. Formally, the SDI is defined as

$SDI_t = f(SDG_1, \ldots, SDG_{17})\,,$

with each SDG indicator normalized and weighted equally (Akusta, 3 Dec 2025). The index synthesizes disparate dimensions—growth, education, health, environmental quality—into a tractable metric applied in time-series analysis of macro-sustainability drivers.

Regionally, the Socioeconomic Development Index utilizes principal component analysis (PCA) to condense 16 economic, social, health, education, and infrastructure indicators (e.g., GDP per capita, hospital beds, sewerage service) into weighted provincial scores (Akusta, 2 Dec 2025). Subsequent k-means clustering—optimized via the elbow method—segments provinces into four distinct development strata (“very high,” “high,” “medium,” “low”), exposing persistent territorial disparities relevant to SDG 8 and SDG 10.

The Ecosystem Vitality Index (EVI), drawn from the Yale EPI framework, encapsulates environmental sustainability through a weighted sum of seven subindices: biodiversity & habitat, ecosystem services, fisheries, acid rain, agriculture, water resources, and a total vitality index (Akusta, 2 Dec 2025). Each subcomponent itself averages validated indicators (e.g., “tree cover loss” for habitat, “fish stock status” for fisheries). These indices provide the empirical substrates for econometric and multi-criteria analyses of sustainability trajectories across economic, social, and biophysical matrices.

2. Economic Growth, Globalization, and SDGs

Türkiye’s sustainable development dynamics are strongly shaped by globalization and economic expansion. ARDL models with SDI as the dependent variable and KOF economic, social, and political globalization indices as explanatory variables reveal asymmetrical impacts (Akusta, 3 Dec 2025). Economic globalization exhibits consistently positive short- and long-run elasticity with respect to SDI (0.144, 0.153), attributable to trade liberalization, FDI, and global supply chain integration. Political globalization, covering adherence to treaties and multilateral policies, displays the strongest effect (0.254 short-run, 2.634 long-run), highlighting governance and institutional harmonization as sustainability drivers.

Social globalization, in contrast, has a negative short-run impact on SDI (–0.150), likely reflecting adjustment costs (inequality, social dislocation), but turns positive in the long run (0.080) as knowledge diffusion and social capital accumulate.

The aggregate effect of globalization (total KOF index) is robustly positive for SDI in both short- and long-term contexts (0.339, 0.196). Error-correction terms indicate annual adjustment speeds back to equilibrium of 14–44%.

Methodological rigor is ensured through ADF and PP unit-root tests (all variables I(0) or I(1)), ARDL bounds tests for cointegration (all models’ F-statistics well above critical values), and a battery of diagnostic and stability checks: no serial correlation, homoskedasticity, normality, or structural instability (CUSUM).

3. Environmental Trade-offs of Economic Development

Empirical analyses employing the EVI index document a complex coupling between economic growth and environmental systems (Akusta, 2 Dec 2025). ARDL estimations from 1995–2021 reveal positive but modest long-run linkages between GDP and agricultural (+0.074% per 1% GDP) and water resource (+0.672%) sustainability subindices, reflecting gains from infrastructure and modernization.

However, economic growth exerts negative elasticities on biodiversity & habitat (–0.116), ecosystem services (–0.591), fisheries (–1.362), acid rain (–2.144), and total ecosystem vitality (–0.668) in the long run. These magnitudes imply that while sectoral investments (agriculture, water) yield local environmental improvements, aggregate ecosystem health deteriorates with unmitigated growth due to increased resource extraction, pollution, and land use change.

Population density, energy intensity, and trade-to-GDP ratio additionally compound environmental pressures—these controls feature negative coefficients in all models, reinforcing the need for coordinated policy on urban form, energy transition, and logistics.

4. Regional Disparities and Inclusive Development

The structuring of sustainable development outcomes across Türkiye is characterized by pronounced geographic heterogeneity (Akusta, 2 Dec 2025). PCA- and clustering-based indices reveal that only İstanbul and Ankara belong to the “very high” cluster out of 81 provinces. Thirty provinces are ranked “high,” 25 “medium,” and 24 “low,” with the western and Marmara regions over-represented among high performers and eastern/southeastern Anatolia lagging.

Key determinants include infrastructure (electricity, sewerage), health access (hospital beds, physicians), economic structure (GDP per capita, trade), and educational attainment. Visualization via QGIS mapping confirms the spatial stratification. These disparities challenge the universal applicability of national targets and mandate targeted interventions in infrastructure, health, education, SME support, and social inclusion—central to SDG 8 and SDG 10 strategies.

The periodically updated index methodology (every 3–5 years), including region-specific monitoring, is recommended to track and recalibrate policy efficacy.

5. Energy Transition and Renewable Resource Prioritization

Sustainable energy transformation is methodologically addressed via Fuzzy AHP prioritization, ranking solar, wind, hydroelectric, biomass, and geothermal alternatives against 30 sub-criteria organized in five dimensions (technical, economic, political, social, environmental) (Akusta et al., 5 Dec 2025). Pairwise expert judgments are aggregated using triangular fuzzy numbers, and priorities are defuzzified per Chang’s extent analysis. The major finding is that economic criteria (0.416) dominate investment decision weightings, followed by political (0.353), technical (0.125), environmental (0.060), and social (0.046) dimensions.

Solar and wind energy consistently rank highest overall (0.240 and 0.230), reflecting superior technical, economic, and environmental sub-scores. Hydroelectric is competitive (0.216), particularly in economic and technical criteria, but is penalized in environmental and social aspects. Biomass and geothermal lag, hampered by lower perceived economic and political advantages.

Alignment is observed with national energy strategy, which emphasizes solar and wind deployment via auctions and feed-in tariffs. Recommendations include expanding grid and storage infrastructure, incentivizing hybrid systems, scaling R&D and local manufacturing, and strengthening environmental and social assessments.

6. Sectoral Interactions: Military, Energy, and Carbon Emissions

Recent ARDL analyses with interaction terms isolate the relationship between military expenditures, renewable energy deployment, and environmental outcomes (Akusta, 4 Dec 2025). Military expenditures increase CO₂ emissions in both the short (elasticity 0.260) and long run (0.196). Renewable energy use exerts a statistically significant negative effect (–0.119 short-run, –0.120 long-run); GDP growth and population growth also increase emissions (GDP: 0.193 long-run; population: 0.095 long-run).

Critically, the interaction between military expenditures and renewable energy share (RE × ME) reveals a mitigating effect: a 1% joint increase reduces CO₂ emissions by 0.14% in the long run. This documents the potential of targeted green-procurement mandates and renewable microgrids for military bases to offset defense-related emissions, supporting SDG 7 and SDG 13 objectives.

Policy prescriptions include integrating environmental impact assessment into military procurement, reallocating defense R&D toward clean energy, and mandating renewable share targets within the defense sector.

7. Policy Implications and Prospects for Future Research

A suite of tailored policy interventions is recommended across studies:

• Trade, investment, and social policy: deepen liberalization and FDI, but pair with digital inclusion and social programs to compensate short-run social globalization costs (Akusta, 3 Dec 2025).
• Environmental regulations: implement strict land-use controls, expand protected areas, accelerate renewable energy subsidies, and establish carbon pricing mechanisms to internalize environmental externalities (Akusta, 2 Dec 2025).
• Territorial targeting: allocate infrastructure, education, and health funding disproportionately to “low” cluster provinces; develop region-specific R&D hubs; foster SME diversification (Akusta, 2 Dec 2025).
• Energy portfolio optimization: expand fiscal incentives for solar and wind; upgrade grid management; invest in hybrid and storage solutions; strengthen local capacity in manufacturing and workforce (Akusta et al., 5 Dec 2025).
• Green defense strategy: mandate renewable energy shares in military operations and exploit cross-sectoral innovation synergies (Akusta, 4 Dec 2025).

Further research directions include: disaggregating SDI by pillar to isolate dominant SDG drivers of globalization, extending ARDL frameworks to panel data among emerging economies, analyzing post-2021 effects of COVID-19 and geopolitical volatility, incorporating higher-frequency datasets, and employing advanced MCDM methods (e.g., Fuzzy ANP, dynamic optimization) to evaluate interdependencies among sustainability dimensions.

The evidence base demonstrates that while economic and political globalization and energy transition continue to boost Türkiye’s SDG performance, persistent environmental trade-offs and regional disparities require multifaceted, data-driven, and context-specific policy solutions.