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CESME:Ali Alyanak and his neighbors in Turkiye’s tourist hub Izmir now have to draw water from a shrinking aquifer 170 meters underground even as hotel pools remain full — a sign for many of the region’s dire water crisis amid prolonged drought.
“Our parents used to draw water from a depth of eight to nine meters, but now we have to go down to 170 meters (560 feet),” said Alyanak, the 39-year-old village chief in Germiyan.
To cope, authorities in nearby Cesme, a popular seaside resort in Izmir province on Turkiye’s western coast, are restricting drinking water access to 10 hours a day.
The city of Izmir itself, Turkiye’s third largest, will cut that access to just six hours starting Wednesday.
Desolate images from the large nearby dam that supplies Cesme, widely broadcast on television, illustrated the risks for the region: its water level has plunged to three percent of capacity, leaving behind a barren landscape.
For Alyanak and many others, the culprit is clear.
“Hotels are the main problem: The water in the pools evaporates, towels are washed daily and people take three to five showers a day, as soon as they go swimming or come back from outside,” Alyanak fumed.
“It’s a waste.”
Climatologists say the Mediterranean basin — which concentrates 30 percent of world tourism — will see a sharp decline in rainfall over the coming decades, raising fears of more frequent and severe droughts as a result of global warming.


The almost complete absence of rainfall since autumn is largely responsible for the current crisis, with some scientists calculating that 88 percent of Turkiye’s territory is at risk of desertification.
Last week, mosque loudspeakers across Turkiye issued prayers for rain.
But experts also highlight the impact of tens of thousands of visitors, which is putting pressure on tourism hotspots throughout the Mediterranean.
Selma Akdogan of the Izmir Chamber of Environmental Engineers said tourists consumed “two to three times” more water than locals.
This at a time when “water levels are falling not only in summer but also in winter,” she said, noting that “Rainfall is less regular but more intense, making it more difficult for the soil to absorb rainwater.”
She wants local authorities to have hotels fill their swimming pools with seawater, for example, and for locals to give up lawns and grass in favor of less water-intensive yards.


At the helm of a luxury 253-room establishment overlooking the turquoise waters of the Aegean sea, Orhan Belge has little patience for the media focus on the issue.
“Big four- or five-star hotels like ours have water tanks of 200-250 tons. We have water 24 hours a day,” said Belge, who is also president of the city’s hoteliers’ union.
For him, the solution to water shortages lies mainly in desalination, a costly and energy-intensive process already used by some hotels in the region.
The manager of a small hotel in the city, who asked to remain anonymous, acknowledged that “water shortages are a real problem,” but said he was primarily worried that use restrictions would prompt tourists to look elsewhere.
“Last summer, we were fully booked during the same period. And we were still full two weeks ago,” he said.
“Now, the hotel is 80 percent empty and we have no reservations for August.”
Sabiha Yurtsever, an 80-year-old retiree who has spent every summer in Cesme for the past 25 years, said she could not remember a summer so dry.
She blamed both the government and hoteliers for making the region unliveable.
“When forests burn, they build hotels instead of replanting,” said Yurtsever, who spends the rest of the year in Izmir.
“The fewer trees you have, the less rain you will get.”

HANOI: Vietnam has been hit by an increasing number of outbreaks of African swine fever, with the number of infected pigs more than tripling in just two weeks, state media said on Tuesday.
The country has detected 972 African swine fever outbreaks so far this year, up from 514 reported in mid-July, the Tien Phong newspaper reported.
The number of pigs infected has risen to more than 100,000 from 30,000 over the same period, the paper said, citing Vietnam’s agriculture ministry. The infected pigs have died or been culled.
“ASF has broken out on a very large scale, spreading across the country, seriously affecting the livestock industry, especially the supply of pork,” Nguyen Xuan Duong, chairman of the Animal Husbandry Association of Vietnam, was quoted as saying. He added that no province is safe from the disease.
African swine fever has disrupted the global pork market for years. In the worst outbreak over 2018-19, about half the domestic pig population died in China, the world’s biggest producer, causing losses estimated at over $100 billion.
The outbreaks in Vietnam last month prompted Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh to send an urgent directive to provinces and government agencies to deploy measures to curb the disease, which the government said was threatening to disrupt food supplies.
Though Vietnam was the first country reportedly to have developed an African swine fever vaccine that has been in commercial use since 2023, officials said the vaccination rate was low due to concerns about costs and efficiency.
“Vaccination is just a supporting tool that can not replace basic prevention measures,” Duong said.
AVAC Vietnam JSC, the country’s main African swine fever vaccine producer, didn’t respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
AVAC said in June it had sold 3 million vaccine doses in the domestic market and exported 600,000 doses to other countries, including the Philippines and Indonesia.