ATP News

Noyan Tapan Highlights
January 12, 2009

Armenia Tree Project Woos Green Future For Next Generations
By Zaruhi Shushanyan

Like all kids, my little neighbor five-year-old Aramik loves playing in the yard. A few weeks ago, I met him crying, as his mother had punished him for climbing on top of a garage with his friends. When I asked the sobbing child whether it would be safer for them to play in the playground in the nearby park, he said with a somewhat grim expression on his face: “Didn’t you know that they have pulled down the playground to build a café in the park?”

Hundreds of children like Aramik long for green space and fresh air as the stuffy summer scorches our small mountainous country. With cafes, buildings, garages and shopping centers springing up all over in our country, the future Armenia’s forests and green areas looms.

According to environmental statistics, since the turn of the 19th century, Armenia has witnessed a dramatic plunge in forest cover from 25% of its territory to the current low estimated at 9%. Although no comprehensive data on Armenia’s forests has been available recently, the last registration of the forests in 1993 has shown that forest cover constituted 334,100 hectares or 11.2% of Armenia’s territory.

In quest of an answer to whether there is no chance to save the alarming ecological situation in Armenia, I came across the website of the Armenian Tree Project (ATP), a non-profit organization that turned out to herald the first large-scale environmental campaign in Armenia.

Since 1994, ATP has planted and restored about 2.5 million trees by focusing on tree planting, community development and environmental education to protect Armenia’s flora and fauna.

According to Mher Sadoyan, ATP Director, the organization’s long-range objective is to combat illegal woodcutting for commercial purposes by promoting sustainable national environmental projects with public participation and training specialists to ensure effective forest management.

Noyan Tapan: Please, tell us is brief about the short-term objectives of ATP.

Mher Sadoyan: Together with the German KfW Bank and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), we planned to launch a reforestation program on a 400 hectare plot in Jrashenj and Tsakhkaber in Lori region. About 1,200,000 seedlings are to be propagated and taken from Margahovit nursery to plant them in Lori next year. This is the first-large scale program of our organization, as planting 400 hectares of forest in a year is a difficult task. So, we must be well-prepared to be able to meet the deadline.

Unfortunately, our programs have suffered a setback since the global financial crisis hit the global market. Though we had to suspend some of our projects, KfW stands ready to support our regional reforestation programs by 2011.

NT: What about ATP’s Rural Mountainous Development (RMD) Program and Community Tree Planting (CTP)?

MS: In partnership with Armenia’s village residents and local organizations, ATP has designed a restoration and reforestation project assisting the development of tree-related micro-enterprises and promoting the purchase and planting of trees.

As part of its Rural Mountainous Development (RMD) Program, ATP began a completely new reforestation project on a 40 hectare (100 acre) on community land-plot in Jrashen by planting total 81,000 mixed tree-species. We also undertook the construction of a new Michael and Virginia Ohanian Environmental Center in Margahovit village of Lori Marz, which is an ongoing process and will be continued also next year. Due to our successful collaboration with Hayantar, ATP managed to establish a new forest on 5 hectare land plot in Jrashen. The land was kindly allocated to ATP by the state Hayantar Service.

Last fall, ATP planted the first 7,000 oak seedlings at the site. The organization had the full support of the community, and the 25 trained tree-planters hired from Lori region welcomed the opportunity to work as part of the ATP initiative. This program has allowed families to improve their socio-economic situation, while at the same time improving the local environment and natural resource base.

We will continue our activities in urban and rural communities despite the crisis. ATP will keep implementing small-scale programs as part of the Community Tree Planting Program (CTP). We will give priority to the regions that take the most active interest in our initiatives. Unfortunately, we cannot involve new regions and villages in our programs until the global economic situation stabilizes.

As part of CTP, we plant trees in territories adjacent to churches and historic sites, and in local neighborhoods and villages. Our specialists also offer free consultations and carry out research and monitoring to support forest management and public participation.
Thanks to our efforts, tourists and vacationers can enjoy their picnics in a bushy forest near the Noravank church. We have also saved the site nearby the Khor Virap church from complete deforestation.

The CTP program planted 22,085 trees and shrubs from ATP’s Karin and Khachpar nurseries in spring 2008. In addition, 1,300 pine seedlings from the Mirak Family Reforestation Nursery were planted in collaboration with the Nor Nork Greenery Department.

This fall, the CTP program planted 33,965 trees and shrubs at 97 sites in Yerevan and nine regions of Armenia. In addition, ATP’s apricot, wild apple, peach, and pear trees at 115 sites provided a harvest of 227,439 kg (507,317 lbs) of fresh fruit, thus benefiting local communities and institutions.

NT: ATP was the first organization to launch environmental education centers in Armenia. How do these institutions work and who can enroll in them?

MS: ATP inaugurated its Michael and Virginia Ohanian Environmental Education Center in the village of Karin on October 12, 2004. The establishment of this ATP educational center is the result of a generous donation from Mrs. Virginia Ohanian of Belmont, MA, in memory of her husband, the late Michael Ohanian.

ATP established its nursery in Karin in 1996, and as part of an expansion of its programs, ATP has added environmental and forestry education to its mission. Immediately after Mrs. Ohanian learned about this program, this educational center was proposed and established on the nursery site.

The Michael and Virginia Ohanian Environmental Education Center provides much-needed jobs, but it also fills a need for hands-on agricultural training. Over 800 students from the Agricultural Academy and the local schools have studied at the center just this year alone.

On June 24, 2008, ATP established new Michael and Virginia Ohanian Center for Environmental Studies in Northern Armenia. In late 2007, while looking at photographs of the hundreds of students participating in ATP’s environmental education program in Armenia, Mrs. Ohanian announced that she wanted to do something significant for the organization. The new center will become an integral part of our regional programs, where ATP has focused its reforestation efforts to combat the huge losses to the forests.

ATP’s tree planting efforts have grown exponentially over the past several years and its environmental education curriculum is taught to hundreds of students each year at the Ohanian Center. Our goal is to foster a new generation of environmental stewards in Armenia’s schools and colleges. ATP also has a preliminary agreement with Hayantar on opening a similar education center in Noyemberyan region.

Good news for ATP and other environmental organizations in Armenia is that in 2008 Hayantar changed its status of an Ltd, becoming a governmental body. We hope that it will help eliminate illegal woodcuttings, which would support our efforts to preserve and restore Armenia’s environment. These changes also herald legislative reforms in the sector. As for the RA Ministry of Nature Protection, it has a supervisory function and controls the sector.

In 2005, ATP published Karla Wesley’s “Plant an Idea, Plant a Tree” environmental manual for teachers. ATP has designed the book to include environmental education in the regular curriculum of Armenia’s public schools.

NT: Tell us a little about ATP’s coppicing programs and state-of-the-art nurseries.

MS: Fifty-three varieties of high quality, drought resistant, indigenous trees are propagated for our Community Tree Planting (CTP) program at our nurseries in the villages of Karin and Khachpar. These nurseries also serve as research and training facilities for tree nursery technology and open new employment opportunities for Armenian refugees.

Annually, over 55,000 seedlings are produced by ATP’s Karin and Khachpar for planting in villages, schools, orphanages, parks, hospitals and senior centers. ATP established orchards and parks deliver a multitude of benefits to local residents.

ATP has made enormous strides in combating desertification by planting and restoring more than 2.5 million trees since 1994, and hundreds of jobs have been created for Armenians in seasonal tree regeneration programs.

Our strategy includes producing trees on an increasingly larger scale on a yearly basis at our state-of-the-art nurseries in Karin and Khachpar, as well as at our new Mirak Reforestation Nursery in Margahovit and in backyard reforestation nurseries (micro-enterprises) in the rural Getik river valley.

ATP officially inaugurated its Mirak Family Reforestation Nursery in Margahovit, when Dr. Robert Mirak, the program’s primary benefactor, visited the nursery on July 17, 2008.
This nursery has allowed ATP to expand its capacity in reforestation, and served as a launching pad for our partnership with Yale University’s school of forestry. Experts from Yale have worked here in the local forests with Armenian volunteers and professionals. The nursery contains over 500,000 seedlings of pine, maple, oak, ash, and other indigenous trees.

NT: A few years ago, ATP launched a large-scale tree-planting project in Tsitsernakaberd. Is this program still effective?

MS: ATP launched its coppicing program in Tsitsernakaberd in 1996. During the economic blockade in the early 1990s, most of the trees growing near the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Tsitsernakaberd were cut for heating fuel. The territory would have undergone compete desertification if we have not launched our restoration projects. We brought seedlings from the Mirak nursery, and cleaned the territory since 2007, but the program implementation was much more active in 1996-2000 than it is now.

NT: This year ATP was recognized National Winner of the prestigious Energy Globe Award for Sustainability. What does this noteworthy award call for?

MS: ATP’s backyard nursery micro-enterprise program was selected as the National Winner for Armenia of the Energy Globe Award, also known as the World Award for Sustainability. ATP Boston representatives attended the awarding ceremony on May 26 at the European Parliament in Brussels, where the program was selected from among 853 projects from 109 nations.

The innovative ATP program is mitigating poverty-driven deforestation by creating micro-enterprise tree nurseries in the Getik River Valley of northern Armenia. These nurseries are owned by hundreds of Armenia’s most impoverished families, who have doubled their annual income by participating in the backyard nursery program.

This year, ATP purchased 309,620 seedlings from backyard nurseries of 399 rural families. These seedlings were planting in surrounding deforested hillsides of Gegharkunik and Tavush regions.

ATP hired 100 local residents to plant new seedlings on 100 hectares (250 acres) of land belonging to the Aygut community (Gegharkunik Marz).

It is worth mentioning that the award gala in Brussels also included remarks by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and EU Council President Janez Jansa, as well as performances by Dionne Warwick, Alanis Morissette and Zucchero.

(The Energy Globe Awards was initiated by Wolfgang Neumann of Austria in 1999, and he is one of the presidents of the Energy Globe Foundation. - NT).

NT: Alongside with environmental projects, ATP focuses on agricultural programs, advocating for social and economic development of villages. Tell us a little about ATP’s village-based model of community development.

MS: Poverty is one of the great enemies of forests. Historically, people with no other viable source of income or energy have destroyed the forests that were their lifelines, due to non-sustainable harvesting. As such, successful reforestation must be combined with locally based poverty reduction efforts in order to protect existing resources and investments in the future. In both urban and rural settings, poverty reduction and community development activities reduce the pressure on the remaining forests.

After assessing the severity of tree cutting and how it affected the vitality and sustainability of citizens in rural, impoverished areas, ATP laid out a strategy to reforest the Getik River Valley, an area located just north of Lake Sevan.

ATP initiated a pilot project that was designed to reforest degraded lands while generating income through micro-enterprise development in refugee villages. In 2004, ATP taught 17 families in the village of Aygut techniques for growing tree seedlings in backyard nursery plots. With ATP’s technical support these micro-enterprises produced 20,000 seedlings, and ATP paid participants for each seedling transplanted into the forest.

In 2008, we expanded this project to include 399 families who grew nearly 310, 000 seedlings. The development of these “micro-enterprise” nurseries not only provides for larger scale reforestation efforts, but also significantly increases each participant’s annual income.

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