The consortium that won a tender to build a third airport in Istanbul has submitted a new environmental impact report (ÇED) after a court decision ordered that its construction be suspended, the Radikal daily reported on Tuesday.
In May of last year, Turkish consortium Limak-Cengiz-Kolin-Mapa-Kalyon OGG beat three competitors to a €22.1 billion deal to build a new airport to the northwest of Istanbul.
On January 21, in a surprise decision, an Istanbul administrative court ordered the construction of İstanbul's third airport to be suspended to allow an expert review of the project's environmental risk. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said the airport will place the Turkish economy among the strongest in the world.
The decision came after an environmental organization filed a lawsuit with the Istanbul fourth Administrative Court, saying that the ÇED on the planned airport is inaccurate and should be withdrawn. The report played a crucial role in the decision of the Ministry of Environment and Urban Planning to launch the tender.
According to Radikal, the winning consortium submitted a new, 1,347 page ÇED to the Ministry of Transportation on March 6, and if the new environmental report is approved, it will invalidate the decision to halt construction.
The new ÇED includes an ecological evaluation report prepared by Professor Latif Kurt, an academic in the department of biology of Ankara University, stating that the project needs to be assessed in detail or it could lead to a large-scale loss of habitat and biomass in the region, along with a positive appraisal of the plans from the Ministry of Defense, the daily reported.
The project is the second-most expensive development project in modern Turkish history, ranking just under the $32 billion Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) network of dams.
The plans to construct the new airport were unveiled in January of last year, and the project could be completed as early as 2017. The Ministry of Transportation predicted last month that the airport will be able to handle 90 million passengers a year after opening in 2017 and gradually make it to the world-record capacity of 150 million passengers.
There are two airports in the city at present—Istanbul Atatürk Airport, on the European side of the city, and Sabiha Gökçen International Airport, on the Asian side—both of which are quite large. In 2011 İstanbul Atatürk Airport saw more than 37 million passengers and Sabiha Gökçen over 13 million. However, the two airports cannot meet the growing domestic and international passenger demand.
Source: Today’s Zaman
