ESC: SaveThe Seas and Sea Turtles

Our Association TEAM (Akdeniz Üçüncü Göz Eğitim ve Gençlik Derneği -Third Eye Assossiation of Mediterranean) has been founded in November in 2009.We aim to help youth aged 17-30 who are having social and economical difficulties by social activities, campaigns, voluntary works and training camps. To fight with discrimination, racism, xenofobia we provide youth social inclusion activities, non formal training sessions. We also cooperate with local governorates and NGOs. We try to decrease the problems mentioned above and try to form a healthy, well trained, open minded, analytical thinking and environmentalally friendly youngsters. As an environmentalist organization, we aim to protect the forest, plant trees, clean the beaches, support the Zero Waste Stradegy; protect the sea-sides from garbage and pollution and We especially focus on protecting the Sea-Turtles (Caretta-Carettas and Cheolonia Mydas) which are laying their eggs on Kazanlı beach, are under danger of extinction with cooperation of local municipalities, Mersin University, Provincial Directorate of Environment. We also cooperate with the recycling centre in order to have a chance to recycle the garbage that we have collected and create an awareness of recycling system among the local people. We also aim to raise awareness on Climate change effects and how we can reduce the negative impacts by reducing the facts of it. TEAM is located in the town called Kazanlı which is 16km to Mersin city centre and most of the residents are farmers.They are planting and growing vegetables and fruits in greenhouses in Kazanlı to run their life. We also try to educate them to use environment friendly,organic pesticides and decrease the level of using them and how to decrease the level of the plastic they use and how to control the garbage of plastics and remains of greenhouses at the end of the farming season with the help of agriculture engineers and local authorities. Furthermore Climate change impacts are very visible and can be felt on high level among farmers because they have to take precautions agains hot weather in summer and against cold weather in winters that's why We also try to make them to be aware of it and act as a conscious farmers against climate change effects and We also share our outputs with our volunteers in order to make them aware of the problem. The coast of Kazanlı is the spawning area of two species of sea turtles in the Mediterranean. These turtles are Green Turtle (Chelonia Mydas) and Loggerhead (Caretta caretta). Both species are classified as endangered (EN)animals in the red list issued by the World Conservation Union (IUCN). The main spawning area of the green turtles in which the spawning areas are very limited is the coast of Kazanlı. According to scientific researches 1 in 1000 of the baby turtles can reach up to adulthood and TEAM aims to increase this number 2 in 1000 Which means 100% success of our target. According to other scientific researches , temprature of the sand has an important role to identify the gendre of the sea-turtles while they are in incubation period in the eggs under the sand. Our organisation's activities and works aim to be able to show the climate change impacts on identifying the gendre of the Sea turtles after 2028 with the number of the nests, since We started our activities in 2010. Because a female sea turtle returns back to the same beach where they were born after 18 years to mate and lay their eggs. We believe that 'If you do not take part in the solution process of a certain problem, Actually You cannot go further than being the problem itself '. In this sense We want to take part in the solution process of any problems around as much as we can and We want to create awareness on the problems in order to speak about the solutions not the problems.