Assessing vulnerability to social and environmental changes in West Aegean Coastal Side of Turkey : 54th ERSA Congress/Regional Development & Globalisation: Best Practices/St. Petersburg Russia August 26-29, 2014

After 1980's as a result of neo-liberal policies in development strategies of Turkey, coastal areas exposed a massive pressure on its environmental resources. Attractiveness of natural amenities and due to encouragement with regulations for tourism sector development caused population growth and agglomeration of real estate investments in these areas. Also, this process has triggered degradation of environmental values. Paradoxically, the coastal management policies and protection mechanisms gained significance for the sustainability of natural resources. All these mechanisms have revealed the importance of understanding and assessing the vulnerability of these areas with regards to continuing trends of environmental and social change and natural resource consumption that restricts sustainability. From this point of view, this research is focused on the evaluation of vulnerability to these changes in Aegean cost side of Turkey; Izmir - Aydýn - Muðla Provinces. Assessment of vulnerability is based on the definition of IPCC that identify the vulnerability as a function of exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. With a basic analytical framework, it's assumed that vulnerability will increase as the sensitivity rise and decrease as adaptive capacity improves. Another assumption is built on the concept of sensitivity. It is defined as the changing trends in social and environmental indicators (land-use change, population growth, water and energy consumption, waste generation etc.) that demonstrate pressure and threat to socio-ecological system. Furthermore, exposure component is excluded from the evaluation. Adaptive capacity index is based on normalization of social, economic, environmental, pyhsical, institutional capital indicators and arithmetic means of these components. This framework will help to understand, compare and exhibit a geographical pattern of vulnerability in the study area.