Joint Coordinating Meeting for Earthquake Risk Reduction and Prevention Planning for Bursa Metropolitan Municipality: Reporting the Current Progress and Discussing the Following Steps Together

On September 26, 2024, Bursa Metropolitan Municipality (BMM) and JICA hosted the 3rd Joint Coordinating Meeting, inviting the related departments, organizations, and experts to mark the project's halfway point.

As it is renowned, Bursa was the first capital of the Ottoman Empire and is not only a culturally and historically important city but also an industrial zone as the fourth largest city in Türkiye with a population of about 3 million. On the other hand, it is also known there are a lot of fault underground, and the city has high risk of earthquakes. If a big earthquake happens in the future, human and economic damage would be huge, and therefore taking the disaster mitigation measures is highly necessary. In order to respond to the urgent need, Bursa Metropolitan Municipality (BMM) and JICA are together formulating the Urban Resilience Plan, by identifying and assessing the risk and hazard, as well as by promoting understanding of the assessment. and adaptation to the existing urban planning.

The meeting started with the welcome speech delivered by the Head of Urban Transformation Department, Mr. Tahir Yılmazeli and Director, Disaster Risk Reduction Group Team 2, Global Environment Department, JICA, Mr. Kenichi Kobayashi. JICA Expert Team reported the result of the hazard and risk assessment in infrastructure such as road, bridge, water and sewerage, electricity and gas supply, dams, railway and public buildings like schools in Bursa. Alongside the risk assessment, with the cooperation of JICA, BMM is formulating the new urban plan by reflecting the result of the risk assessment. It was discussed which infrastructure should be prioritized in the new urban plan and how to incorporate the plan into the national risk-reduction plan and other urban plans, which also confirmed room for further discussion.
After the fruitful presentation and discussion, Secretary General of BMM, Associate Professor Dr. Ergül Halisçelik closed the meeting by expressing appreciation to JICA and by emphasizing the importance of the cooperation of all the related institution and organizations for the project and for Bursa’s development.

As Secretary General of BMM also mentioned, this project still has the second half of the period. JICA continues to support BMM for the formulation of the disaster risk-based urban planning in the large city of Bursa. Together with BMM, we hope to strengthen and deepen cooperation between Türkiye and Japan toward disaster risk reduction.