The land is graced by nature from one end to the other. Above all, countries having such clean shores are rare. You can see deep inside the sea, the water is crystal clear. The land is also adorned with unique species of plants. Mediterranean flora is quite typical, but it also features a vast diversity (of plants).

HOST: Hallo, eco-aware viewers, and welcome to Planet Earth: Our Loving Home. On today's program we travel to Cyprus to meet Dr. Doğan Sahir, an architect and the president of the non-profit environmental organization, the Cyprus Green Action Group and Dr. Salih Gücel, director and assistant professor at the Near East University's Environmental Science Institute to learn about this Mediterranean island's unique ecosystem and the environmental challenges its inhabitants are facing due to harmful human activities and climate change.

We start with agriculture. Like elsewhere in the world, cultivating crops in a conventional manner causes long-term damage to the land upon which food is grown and even adversely affects areas far away from the farming operations.

Dr. Doğan (m): We use excessive amounts of chemical fertilizers during our agricultural production. These chemicals are under strict control or completely banned in many countries, but we still tend to see them as very helpful additions and use them excessively, despite us having little land to cultivate.

In a setting where neither adequate control nor certain monitoring procedures are in place we are detecting serious chemical accumulations in soil. Certain locations suffer severe hazards of accumulated chemicals. This naturally has an impact on the crops, not to mention the problems set off when these chemicals are washed away by rain; these can contaminate the ground water and surface streams on their route to the sea and they will cause more problems in the seas.

Dr. Doğan (m): We use herbicides to control the weeds. We have already wiped out many of our endemic plants. Be it endemic or not, any plant in an ecosystem has a role, increases the biodiversity, but sadly we have damaged this as well, and we keep cornering these plants each and every day.

To contact today's guests, please visit the following websites Dr. Doğan (Cyprus Green Action Group) www.Facebook.com/group.php?gid=51585678216
 Dr. Salih Gücel
www.CYEF.net/en/node/741