Turkey’s Lake Tuz dries up due to climate change and farming

A man walks along Lake Tuz in Aksaray province, Turkey (Emrah Gurel/AP)

Turkey’s second-largest lake has entirely receded this year, with experts blaming climate change-induced drought and decades of harmful agricultural policies that have exhausted underground water supply.

For centuries, Lake Tuz (Salt Lake in Turkish) in central Turkey has hosted huge colonies of flamingos that migrate and breed there when the weather is warm, feeding on algae in the lake’s shallow waters.