Turkey’s central Anatolian plateau is one of the country’s most important agricultural regions, producing wheat, maize, sugar beet and other crops. Yet beneath its cultivated fields, the ground is becoming increasingly unstable.

Large sinkholes, some tens of metres wide and deep, have appeared across the Konga basin, swallowing farmland, and threatening nearby roads and settlements.

These collapses can occur suddenly, sometimes in fields that have been cultivated for generations. Around 20 are opening up every year, according to a recent study.

Known locally as obruks, sinkholes are not a new geological phenomenon. They have existed in the Konya basin for thousands of years, but they have become far more frequent over recent decades.

Konya’s sinkholes are consequently both a geological hazard and evidence of a wider water-management problem. The cavities beneath the fields are the product of geological processes extending over thousands of years. Their recent instability, however, is occurring within a groundwater system profoundly altered by human activity and increasingly exposed to drought.

As representatives of countries all over the world prepare to head to Turkey to discuss climate change at the UN’s Cop 31 conference, Ankara continues to grapple with this escalating environmental disaster at home.

The nation’s disaster and emergency management authority (AFAD) has recently documented 684 sinkholes across Konya, Karaman and Aksaray in Turkey’s agricultural heartlands.

The growing number of sinkholes is often attributed to drought and climate change. But intensive groundwater extraction for agriculture can also increase the risk of collapse.

Decades of intensive agricultural irrigation have altered the conditions beneath the basin’s surface. Groundwater, which is the layer of water below the Earth’s surface,........

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