Helping Istanbul prepare for a major earthquake

The risk of a major earthquake striking Istanbul in the next decades is very high. Given the city’s population and economic importance, a tremor of high magnitude would lead to dramatically higher human, economic and environmental losses than the ones caused by the 1999 Marmara quake.

Worker on a construction site in Turkey

In 2014, the CEB approved an additional loan of € 250 million to the Republic of Türkiye, continuing its support for the Istanbul Seismic Risk Mitigation and Emergency Preparedness Project (ISMEP) – a large-scale, internationally acclaimed project to gradually transform Istanbul into a city as resilient as possible to a major earthquake. 

Since its inception, ISMEP has gained international visibility as one of the most prominent projects of its kind, and has received substantial financial assistance from, among others, the CEB, the EIB and the World Bank.  

Initiated in 2005 under the sponsorship of the Istanbul province governorship, ISMEP is one of the largest single city seismic risk mitigation programmes in the world. 

The project will improve the strength of the city’s critical public facilities and enhance its institutional and technical capacity for disaster management and emergency response, thereby saving lives and reducing the social and economic effects of a major earthquake.  

This additional CEB loan will continue to focus on the reconstruction and retrofitting of priority public buildings, mostly schools located throughout Istanbul. It will particularly benefit children, who are among the most vulnerable in the event of an earthquake.