Natural capital, climate-related losses and marine protection in Türkiye and four Mediterranean countries: indicators for blue-economy finance
Türkiye ve dört Akdeniz ülkesinde doğal sermaye, iklimle ilişkili kayıplar ve deniz koruma: mavi ekonomi finansmanı için göstergeler
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Abstract
Blue-economy finance needs indicators that link wealth, climate risk and the protection of marine ecosystems, but such indicators are scattered across institutions and often mislabelled when re-published. Using the open GOMD platform and a notebook that retrieves each series live and stops when a series is missing, we analysed World Bank natural-capital accounts for Türkiye, Eurostat/EEA climate-related economic losses and OECD marine protected area (MPA) statistics for Türkiye, Greece, Italy, Spain and France, and the share of insurance and financial services in trade in services. Türkiye's adjusted net savings rose from 5.8% of GDP in 1990 to 12.65% in 2020 (Sen slope +0.39 points per year, p < 10⁻⁶), while the estimated damage from CO₂ emissions doubled from 1.1% to 2.34% of GDP between 1990 and 2021; energy and mineral depletion were small (0.12% and 0.27%). Climate-related losses per person were highest in Italy (75.9 € per year since 2005), Spain (63.0 €), France (50.4 €) and Greece (44.2 €) and increased significantly in Italy (+1.19 € per person per year, p = 0.0003), France (+0.89, p = 0.036) and Greece (+0.13, p = 0.002). In 2024, MPAs covered 0.15% of the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) extent used by OECD for Türkiye, against 4.67% for Greece, 7.43% for Italy, 12.73% for Spain and 38.72% for France; reaching the Kunming-Montreal 30% target would require about 76,800 km² of additional protected area for Türkiye on this basis. We discuss reporting differences, the limits of country aggregates and the indicator safeguards needed for finance and insurance applications.
Keywords
Natural capital; Adjusted net savings; Climate-related economic losses; Insurance protection gap; Marine protected areas; 30x30; Blue finance; Türkiye
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