Climate- and Earthquake-Resilience for Children: South-Eastern Turkiye

Project ID: 2228cd1276 (You will need this ID for your application)

UCL Lead department: Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering (CEGE)

Project Summary:

The south-eastern region of Turkiye, also known historically as the Fertile Crescent, is home to a rich and diverse built environment and communities of many ethnic and religious groups, as well as a number of climatic and geophysical hazards, including flooding, heatwaves, droughts – and earthquakes, as shown by February 2023 earthquake sequence which hit the area very recently. These hazards, in conjunction with a number of socioeconomic and political determinants, including conflict-driven migration from Syria, lead to a number of challenges in rural and urban infrastructure, for people of the area, such as safety problems, degrading/diminishing water resources and food security and disruption in livelihoods through changing efficacy with agricultural production.

This study puts at its heart the children –the most vulnerable&unheard segment of society– to understand the children’s viewpoints of all these stressors and detail how they are affected in ways specific to them, and how the post-disaster recovery processes following the February earthquakes interact with children’s vulnerabilities to climate change, earthquakes and the socio-polito-economic backdrop of the area. To this end, homes and school infrastructure in selected rural/urban settings will be examined to detail their multi-hazard resilience with specific emphasis on children’s vulnerabilities and to co-create strategies and measurable interventions for more resilient, healthy and culturally-responsive rural/urban environs for them with better policies for homes, schools and public spaces. The outcomes of the study will impact on climate policy and practice, and develop means for a more sustainable earthquake recovery.

This study will contribute to the ACHIEVE project, Adaptive Childscapes in the Fertile Crescent: Learning from the past to improve adaptation to climate change and reconstruction in Türkiye, led by a consortium of Canadian, UK&Turkish academics. The student will have the opportunity to work with this multi-disciplinary team of architects, planners, geographers, historians, child-development specialists, and engineers.