Professional Experience:
His academic knowledge complemented with a long term field research in nature conservation and sustainable resource use including protected area establishment, wetland management, sustainable forest management and coastal zone management fields in Turkey. Besides his active involvement for over a decade in the environmental NGOs, widened his knowledge and experience by putting the conservation and sustainable development policies into practice as well as working closely with local people, governmental authorities and private sector. He served as a deputy President for one of the national NGOs namely the Nature Research Association for five years.
Moreover, over ten years of working experience with the European Union Delegation to Turkey has enabled him to further widen his horizon in all aspects of the environmental policies and issues at global, regional and local levels. He has been closely working with the Turkish Government to develop a long term strategic plan to transpose and implement the EU environmental acquis. He has prepared a comprehensive programme which developed an environmental approximation strategy for the Turkish Government, covering more than twenty years of implementation period, with more than €70 bn investment plan. Under the EU pre-accession financial assistance instruments, more than €600 mn for environmental projects between 2001 and 2010 have been allocated. Beside the financial assistance, he also involved in the drafting of the annual, monthly and ad-hoc progress report on Turkey in the field of environment.
An effective coordination with the IFIs such as World Bank, KfW, CEB, AFD, EBRD, and bilateral donors plays an extremely important role in providing the EU grant money to Turkey in a coordinated fashion. As part of EU's financial programme he directly worked with the UN bodies such as UNDP on thematic level (e.g. sustainable development, climate change). He is actively involved in the development of country policy strategies with the World Bank, EIB and AFD, which require a strong networking.
As part of his job, heavily involved in programming, project design, risk assessment, monitoring, evaluation as well as the procurement matters related with the projects. He is very much used to working under time pressure with short deadlines as he need to deal with multi-tasks on his daily job. He also assumes managerial tasks in his department as a second deputy head of section, which consists of 27 staff and managing more than 1 billion Euros financial assistance annually for Turkey. As a Team Coordinator for Environment & Infrastructure Team supervises eight professionals. He is also one of the elected Staff representatives actively dealing with staff matters since 2005.
As a task manager also responsible for the Climate Change issues, he has been closely involved in the preparation of Turkey's ratification of the Kyoto protocol, which was one of the priority accession objectives for the opening of the acc