Türkiye's Mediterranean climate, the one that means hot dry summers and mild wet winters, is no longer keeping to the coast. It is moving north, and uphill, and it is carrying the country's fire risk with it.
That is the picture in a study of how Türkiye's climate zones have shifted, by Murat Türkeş of Boğaziçi University and Nami Yurtseven of İzmir Bakırçay University, published last year in the journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology. They sorted the country into Köppen-Geiger climate types, the standard scheme geographers use, and compared the maps for 1961 to 1990 and 1991 to 2020.
The lines had already moved. The dry-summer Mediterranean climate grew from 28.9 percent of Türkiye's land to 31.8 percent between the two periods. Semi-arid steppe rose from 21.9 percent to 24.2 percent. The cold-climate zone, the belt of long cold winters, shrank from 24 percent to 19.3 percent. Warm and dry was gaining ground; cold and snowy was giving it up.
The projections push the same trend much further. Türkeş and Yurtseven modeled the rest of the century under three of the IPCC's emissions pathways, from the low SSP1-2.6 to the very high SSP5-8.5, for 2041 to 2070 and 2071 to 2099. In every one of them, Mediterranean climates end up covering the largest share of the country, roughly 40 to 45 percent. Semi-arid steppe takes another 30 to 35 percent. Desert climate, almost absent today, starts to appear, most of all under the middling and high-emission runs.
The belts are climbing, too. Under the high-emission path, the study finds the Mediterranean climate moving up about 120 meters in average elevation by mid-century, the humid temperate zone about 220 meters, and the cold zone nearly 290 meters. On the Black Sea coast, Türkeş said, the upper edge of the forest could rise 120 to 220 meters, which reworks mountain ecosystems that took millennia to settle where they are.
In practice, the reclassification means a harder summer. Türkeş, speaking to TRT Haber, said the spread of Mediterranean and steppe climates lengthens and sharpens the summer drought, and stretches the fire season with it. The high wildfire risk now familiar in the Aegean and along the Mediterranean, he said, could become pronounced in Marmara, the western Black Sea, and inner western Anatolia, places that have not thought of themselves as fire country. The study describes a trend, not the cause of any single blaze, but it lands in a summer when Türkiye is again fighting wildfires.
Water is the other squeeze. Less snow means less meltwater soaking into the ground and less filling the reservoirs, Türkeş said, so the water available per person falls just as irrigation demand climbs. Hydroelectric output takes a hit. Desertification risk grows, worst across southern inner Anatolia and inner western Anatolia, where farming is already the most exposed.
Farmers would feel it as a swap. As the Mediterranean climate pushes north, the study's authors expect the range for olives, almonds, figs, grapes, and pistachios to widen. Wheat, barley, sugar beet, and maize go the other way, losing yield as they need more irrigation to hold on. A map of what grows where in Türkiye, drawn a generation from now, would look different from today's.
The clearest loss is at the top. By the last stretch of the century, 2071 to 2099, Türkeş said Türkiye would have almost no glaciers left, save the highest reaches of the eastern Black Sea mountains and Büyük Ağrı, the peak better known abroad as Mount Ararat.
None of this is fixed. The gap between the low and high pathways is exactly the space where choices are made. But the direction is already on the map. The Mediterranean summer that Türkiye sells to tourists is, degree by degree, becoming the climate more of the country lives in year round.