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Law No. 7552 is Türkiye's first binding statute dedicated to climate-change governance. It operates across three interlocking pillars:
1. Emissions Trading System (ETS) Greenhouse gas emission activities must be conducted under mandatory GHG permits from 2026. Covered installations receive annual allowance allocations and must surrender verified emission units annually. The ETS is operated by Enerji Piyasaları İşletme A.Ş. (EPİAŞ) — Türkiye's existing energy-market operator — under supervision of the Presidency of Climate Change. Pilot phase runs from 2026; full commercial implementation begins 2028. Sectors covered are expected to mirror the EU ETS starting sectors: power, industry (steel, cement, aluminium, chemicals, ceramics, glass, fertilizers).
2. Carbon Market Board (Karbon Piyasası Kurulu / CMB) The CMB is chaired by the Minister of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change and includes deputy ministers from seven ministries plus the heads of key regulatory agencies. It approves national allocation plans, determines free-allowance distribution (the critical design choice that sets the implicit carbon price), and sets offsetting limits. The CMB structure mirrors the EU ETS governance architecture (Member State allocation + European Commission oversight), adapted for the Turkish single-issuer institutional context.
3. Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) framework The Presidency of Climate Change is empowered to supervise MRV compliance, accredit verifiers, maintain the GHG registry, and impose administrative sanctions for non-compliance. The MRV architecture is explicitly designed to meet EU CBAM reporting requirements — important because CBAM verification relies on carbon-price signals from the exporter's domestic market to calculate the deductible certificate amount.
Türkiye faces the highest absolute EU CBAM exposure of any non-EU economy:
~5th globally by volume). EU CBAM steel phase-in (2024 reporting, 2026 full enforcement) imposes a carbon cost on embedded emissions not priced domestically.
CBAM product category.
A functioning domestic ETS allows Turkish exporters to deduct paid domestic carbon costs against CBAM certificates — without an ETS, the full CBAM levy becomes a transfer to the EU budget rather than a domestic climate-policy instrument. The law is therefore both a genuine climate commitment (net-zero framing in line with Türkiye's updated NDC post-Paris ratification in 2021) and a defensive commercial instrument against the CBAM compliance cliff.
The law establishes the Presidency of Climate Change as the central executive authority for all climate policy, complementing the Climate Change Action Plan 2021–2030 and the updated NDC (2021, net-zero by 2053). The "green growth" framing signals alignment with EU Green Deal Acquis — an implicit condition of Türkiye's ongoing EU accession process, albeit largely frozen in practice.
Oyak Çimento) face rising compliance costs from 2026 as ETS allowances are priced. The transition from free allocation to auctioning (following EU ETS trajectory) will determine whether CBAM deductibility is commercially viable.
trading, offset project registration, and potential linking arrangements with the EU ETS (a medium-term ambition mentioned in background documents).
minimum institutional prerequisite for allocating capital to Turkish industrial decarbonisation projects.
minerals) — a complementary piece of the Türkiye 2025 industrial-policy legislative bundle.
regulations (the Carbon Market Board decrees and EPİAŞ operational rules) will determine which specific installation categories enter the pilot. Watch for Ministry of Environment circulars in H2 2025 / early 2026.
free-allocation baseline (following EU ETS Phase 3 approach) delays compliance costs but limits CBAM deductibility for actual emissions above benchmark.
accession progress. A bilateral carbon-pricing agreement (analogous to the Switzerland–EU ETS link) is a long-term option.
pressures on Türkiye may delay regulatory rollout.