Disasters and Migration: A Migration Forecast for the Expected Istanbul Earthquake

Abstract

Since people started to struggle with nature, natural events have started to be handled as disasters. What makes a natural event a disaster is the degree to which people are affected by this event. Civilizations, countries and cities have sometimes been destroyed as a result of earthquakes, which are among the most destructive natural events that have occurred since the formation of the Earth. After disasters with great destructive effects such as earthquakes, people had to relocate and this caused waves of migration. Turkey is a country built on active fault lines. For this reason, our country has experienced many destructive earthquakes from past to present. Unfortunately, the recent Kahramanmaraş Earthquake of February 6, 2023 showed that we still do not have the upper hand in terms of earthquakes and caused tens of thousands of casualties, property losses amounting to billions of liras and turned 11 affected provinces into ghost towns. With this earthquake, there was a rapid migration from the region, and people who wanted to find a safe area for themselves migrated to nearby provinces that were not affected by the earthquake, causing a change in the demographics of these provinces. In this context, if the great Istanbul earthquake, which scientists say “will happen”, materializes, to which provinces the migration preferences of the people living in Istanbul will be, and the handling of the issue of migration in the Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction Plans of these provinces were examined.  In this context, the question of the study was determined as “Are the identified provinces prepared for the migration that will occur in the event of the expected Istanbul earthquake?”.  It was observed that this issue was not addressed in IRAPs and attention was drawn to this issue. In addition to this, suggestions are given for the provinces that are expected to receive migration in the event of the expected Istanbul earthquake to create urban resilience against the migration wave.