The importance of environmental issues in the context of sustainable development: A comparison of Turkey and EU

Throughout the history, humankind has affected its environment, and following Industrial Revolution, the size of this effect increased dramatically. Even though the environmental problems caused by the rapid production and consumption patterns that have arisen with the Industrial Revolution have not reached critical levels until the 1970s, the ozone layer depletion in 1970s revealed the emergency of these problems. Thus, the "Brundtland Report" was published in 1987 to solve the environmental problems through "sustainable development" approach. In this study, we focus on the environment and environmental problems in the context of sustainable development and we have compared the environment sustainable development with environmently parameters of Turkey and EU. With the comparative analyze, we have observed that Turkey has disadvantages in contrast with the EU countries. In addition, it has also observed EU countries have not accurately execute the sustainable development and Turkey and EU countries have been made progress in recent years.