Türkiye's Disaster Management Framework: TARAP, TAMP, and TASİP Explained

Disaster Risk Management · Türkiye

A fact-checked guide decoding the national system Türkiye uses to manage its disaster cycle — three plans under a single strategic umbrella, coordinated by AFAD, with primary-source figures, legal citations, and their place within the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

Last fact-checked: July 2026. All statistics below are sourced to AFAD, the Turkish Official Gazette, and peer-reviewed journal articles; every DOI was individually resolved before publication (see References).

Before the three plans, there is a chain of command and a chain of legislation that international readers usually miss.

AFAD sets policy and coordinates nationally, while each of Türkiye's 81 provinces has its own AFAD provincial directorate that executes operations locally under the province's governor. It's more accurate to describe this as centralized policy design with governor-led local execution than as a single unbroken chain of command — a distinction that matters for anyone comparing it to a more devolved system like the United States' FEMA-state-local model.

Importantly, TARAP, TAMP, and TASİP are not the top of the pyramid. All three sit beneath a national umbrella document — the Türkiye Disaster Management Strategy Document and Action Plan — which sets the overall direction that the pre-disaster, response, and recovery plans then implement.

TARAP is built from the bottom up. Each of the 81 provinces first produced its own Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction Plan (İRAP), and these were consolidated to inform TARAP's national goals and actions. A detail worth flagging for comparative researchers: the provincial plans work across 26 hazard types — a broader list than TARAP's 11 — reflecting local hazards (such as land subsidence in specific basins) that don't rise to national-plan status but matter enormously at the provincial level. In their first (2021) iteration, the İRAPs collectively defined roughly 222 goals, 1,364 objectives, and around 12,900 actions across the 81 provinces; these figures are revised periodically as provinces update their plans. Provincial Monitoring and Evaluation Boards are responsible for keeping each İRAP current.

Financing is the area where İRAP execution is evolving fastest, and where it's worth being precise about what already exists versus what is still emerging:

• A dedicated national fund is now in place. The Afet Yeniden İmar Fonu (Disaster Reconstruction Fund) was established to give post-2023 recovery spending a transparent, ring-fenced budget line, rather than leaving it to ad hoc annual allocations.
• Municipal-level matching mechanisms have a track record. The World Bank's long-running Istanbul Seismic Risk Mitigation and Emergency Preparedness Project (ISMEP) has used targeted grants — on the order of $2 million per municipality for equipment and digitization — that catalyzed municipalities to commit substantially larger sums of their own budgets in follow-on reforms, an approach independently reviewed by the World Bank's own evaluation group.
• Multilateral co-financing is scaling up, though currently concentrated on recovery rather than prevention. The World Bank's $650 million Istanbul Resilience Project (approved August 2025) explicitly funds institutional capacity-building for provincial authorities, and the Council of Europe Development Bank has committed €1.2 billion toward ISMEP-related seismic retrofitting. Most of this financing, however, targets the 11 provinces affected by the 2023 earthquakes and greater Istanbul specifically, rather than routine, nationwide İRAP action items in provinces that haven't yet experienced a major disaster.

The natural next step — extending matching-grant and dedicated-fund models from post-disaster reconstruction and Istanbul-specific seismic risk toward routine, preventive İRAP execution nationwide — is a live policy conversation rather than a solved problem, and one where provincial coordinators are well placed to make the case for their own provinces.

Between the point where search-and-rescue operations wind down and permanent reconstruction begins sits a transitional phase — temporary shelter, debris removal, and interim livelihoods — that draws on both TAMP and TASİP without sitting neatly inside either. As TASİP's implementation matures, clarifying the handover mechanics for this "early recovery" window is a natural area for further institutional development.

TARAP states that it aligns with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. Here is a working alignment between Sendai's four priorities and where TARAP's own goal structure addresses them:

This mapping is an analytical synthesis for this article; TARAP's own text organizes its priorities using Sendai's language but does not publish a one-to-one crosswalk table.

Two earthquakes dominate recent Turkish disaster-management literature: the 30 October 2020 İzmir (Samos) earthquake and the twin 6 February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes. It's worth being precise about magnitude and mechanism, since this is where popular coverage tends to blur technical distinctions that structural engineers treat as quite separate.

• The İzmir earthquake measured approximately Mw 6.9.
• The Kahramanmaraş sequence consisted of two major shocks of approximately Mw 7.7 and Mw 7.6, roughly nine hours apart — an unusual double-rupture event that stressed already-damaged structures a second time before rescue operations were complete.

Two distinct technical issues are often conflated in non-specialist writing about the 2023 collapses:

• Site amplification and micro-zonation — soft or poorly characterized soil can amplify shaking intensity at the surface; this is a site-selection and zoning issue, addressed through hazard microzonation mapping and reflected in the 2018 national seismic hazard map.
• Structural failure mechanisms — independent of soil conditions, the 2023 collapses have been linked to soft-story (weak ground-floor) configurations, inadequate transverse (confinement) reinforcement, substandard concrete quality, and construction that predated or evaded the current Turkish Building Earthquake Code (TBDY 2018).

Treating these as a single "poor ground-building harmony" phenomenon understates the case; the two need to be assessed and mitigated through different tools — zoning and site investigation on one hand, code enforcement and retrofitting on the other.

For readers evaluating Türkiye's system against other national frameworks: Türkiye's model bears some resemblance to the United States' three-phase mitigation/response/recovery structure under FEMA's National Response Framework, though the US system is more devolved to states, whereas TARAP/TAMP/TASİP are drafted and issued centrally by AFAD with provincial execution. On international disaster response, Türkiye's Search and Rescue teams operate within the INSARAG classification system used to coordinate cross-border urban search-and-rescue deployments, and Türkiye participates in mechanisms comparable to the EU's Civil Protection Mechanism for regional mutual aid, though as a non-EU member Türkiye's participation runs through separate bilateral and NATO-adjacent channels rather than the EU mechanism itself.

Türkiye's disaster management architecture has matured substantially since AFAD's creation in 2009, moving from a single response-focused agency toward a three-plan cycle nested under a national strategy document, explicitly referencing the Sendai Framework. Each plan has its own areas of active development: TARAP's strength is its granular, dated action list, though provincial-level financing is still catching up to provincial-level ambition, with dedicated funds and multilateral grants so far concentrated on post-disaster provinces rather than nationwide prevention; TAMP's academic reviewers point to coordination refinements worth making between service groups; and TASİP is too new to have a track record yet, with its relationship to older reconstruction law still settling into place. For international DRM practitioners, the more useful frame is not "how good is Türkiye's system" in the abstract, but which of these three plans, and which specific mechanism within it, is relevant to the comparison being made.