Environmental News

ATP’s Sustainable Development Strategies Strive to Protect Armenia’s Natural Heritage
By Jeff Masarjian and Jason Sohigian

Horizon Magazine
December 2009

Photo by Hrair Hawk Khatcherian

Armenia is very special to those of us in the Diaspora for a number of different reasons. Not typically high up on that list--due especially to a lack of public awareness--is the enormous diversity of landscape, plant, and animal life that exists in Armenia. Armenia is located at the convergence of three bio-geographic regions--the arid Central Anatolian and Iranian regions and the temperately damp Caucasian region. It has seven of the world’s nine climate zones because of the diversity of elevation found within the country.

As a result, Armenia has enormous biological diversity, including 3,500 of the 6,000 plant species found in the Caucasus, half of which are at risk of extinction, over 2,000 plant species which have nutritional or healing properties, 13 species and 360 varieties of wheat--which was first cultivated there 10,000 years ago--and 260 species of trees and bushes.

In the animal world, Armenia boasts 17,500 invertebrate and 500 vertebrate species, of which 346 species are birds. Of the 500 vertebrate, 300 are rare or declining and 18 are at risk of extinction, one third of the 156 reptile species in the former Soviet Union are found in Armenia, and due to environmental degradation, many of these species are experiencing loss of habitat.

Photo by Hrair Hawk Khatcherian

If it continues unchecked, the overexploitation of Armenia’s environment will lead to further deforestation, desertification, and land, air, and water pollution. Deforestation is also a leading contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the world, which is one of the drivers of climate change.

To highlight the risk, a report to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change warns that a two-degree Celsius increase in temperature over the 21st century could have the following consequences for Armenia: decrease of total annual flow of water by 15-20 percent, reduction of precipitation by 10 percent, expansion of desert and semi-desert areas by 33 percent, reduction of livestock by 30 percent, and reduction of crops by 8-14 percent.

Issues abound in the areas of Armenia’s water quality, air quality, and energy sectors. For Armenia’s forests, unsustainable use has led to widespread erosion, landslides, loss of topsoil, and flooding. Armenia’s forest cover was 25 percent at the turn of the 20th century and now stands at less than eight percent, according to a 2007 study by the Yerevan-based Economy and Values Research Center. Seventy percent of the wood that is harvested is used by rural villagers for basic heating and cooking needs--the rest is taken both legally and illegally from the forests.

Photo by Hrair Hawk Khatcherian

Hayantar--the Armenian government’s forestry department--is charged with both the protection and usage of the forests, and now lies under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture instead of the Ministry of Nature Protection. And currently, mining and metallurgical industries in Armenia are the main sources of industrial waste. Specifically, copper mining companies are increasing output and also pollution levels.

Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner, remarked that the state of a nation’s environment is a direct reflection on the quality of the nation’s governance, which has the responsibility of setting priorities and providing stewardship of the public environmental trust. “There can be no peace without equitable development and there can be no development without sustainable management of the environment,” she notes.

Our view is that if we don’t give Armenia’s threatened environment as high a priority as the nation’s economy, it will have devastating consequences for those very issues we care about. To cite another statement by Dr. Maathai of Kenya: “[A nation] losing topsoil [as a result of deforestation] should be considered analogous to losing territory to an invading enemy. And indeed, if any country were so threatened, it would mobilize all available resources, including a heavily armed military, to protect the priceless land.”

Background on Armenia’s Forests

Armenia has only three nature reserves (Khosrov, Shikahogh, and Erebuni), four national parks (Arevik, Dilijan, Sevan, and Zangezur), and 23 sanctuaries. In total, protected areas including Lake Sevan and the new Arevik National Park and Zangezur Sanctuary cover 12 percent of Armenia.

The loss of forests in Armenia has been caused by a lack of alternate fuel sources, legal and illegal cutting and export of wood, and improper management of this renewable resource. The harsh reality is that all of Armenia’s forests may be gone in as little as 20 years at the current rate of deforestation, leading to irreversible environmental damage and the loss of a critical component of Armenia’s infrastructure.

As the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jared Diamond noted in his book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” deforestation, soil erosion, and water management problems all result in less food for populations. Such problems have been exacerbated over history by droughts, which have been partly caused by humans through deforestation.

Most experts working in this sector have identified poverty and unemployment as a leading cause of deforestation. Without other sources of income, people inevitably turn to unsustainable harvesting of forest resources. In urban centers such as Yerevan, residents desperate for fuel cut between 2-3 million trees during the energy shortages of the early 1990s. These barren lots were once protective hillsides circling urban areas as a vital barrier to pollution and dust, and once beautiful parks were turned into ecological graveyards or commercial zones.

History and Mission

To begin addressing this crisis, Armenia Tree Project (ATP) was founded by the Armenian-American philanthropist Carolyn Mugar in 1994. In order to develop a plan for an organization that would work towards preventing further tree loss, ATP hired a local staff in Armenia and the organization was launched with a tree-planting at the Nork Senior Center. In the United States, a small staff was hired to do fundraising and public relations among the diasporan communities.

In the early years, thousands of trees were planted in communities throughout the country as part of the Sponsor-A-Tree program funded by thousands of individual donors. Two nurseries were opened in the refugee villages of Karin and Khachpar, forest rejuvenation programs were implemented in the Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial Park and other sites, and a database of diasporan donors was created.

Since 2001, ATP has begun to direct its effort towards more aggressive reforestation, aimed at rehabilitating devastated rural and urban areas and providing citizens with the resources as well as incentive for redeveloping their environment. We launched programs in Aygut Village in the vicinity of Lake Sevan and in Margahovit Village in Lori. As a result, since 1994 over 3,500,000 trees have been planted and restored, and hundreds of jobs were created in tree-regeneration programs.

In its programming, ATP has identified three interrelated goals: tree planting, poverty reduction, and environmental education and advocacy. ATP’s tree planting strategy has two components. First, producing fruit and decorative trees at our Karin and Khachpar nurseries and growing hundreds of thousands of seedlings at the new Mirak Family Reforestation Nursery in Lori and in backyard reforestation nurseries in the Getik River Valley. And second, planting these trees in partnership with residents of urban and rural communities at public sites and areas targeted for reforestation.

Community Development and Poverty Reduction

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. Therefore, reforestation must be combined with poverty reduction in order to protect existing resources and investments. In both urban and rural settings, poverty reduction and community development activities reduce the pressure on 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. ATP initiated a pilot project that was designed to reforest degraded lands while generating income through micro-enterprise development in villages inhabited by Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan. In 2004, ATP taught 17 families in the village of Aygut techniques for growing tree seedlings in backyard nursery plots.

With ATP’s support these micro-enterprises produced 20,000 seedlings, and ATP paid participants for each seedling transplanted into the forest. In 2009, the project was expanded to include 500 families who are growing 500,000 seedlings. The development of these micro-enterprise nurseries not only provides for larger scale reforestation, but also significantly increases each participant’s annual income.

While ATP’s focus is reforestation, it has also encouraged the involvement of other agencies in providing services to the Getik River Valley. Organizations including Heifer International, Project Harmony, World Vision, Armenian Eye Care Project, UNDP, USDA, and Weyerhaeuser Foundation are all involved in projects there. The ultimate goal is to revitalize the socioeconomic and ecological conditions of the villages throughout the Getik River Valley.

Environmental Education and Advocacy

ATP is also developing a major environmental education program in order to promote the concept of stewardship. By actively engaging youth in a process to understand and appreciate the value of a healthy and sustainable environment, ATP seeks to protect the trees planted today from exploitation.

ATP has published an environmental curriculum titled “Plant An Idea, Plant A Tree” that has been approved by the Ministry of Education and is being introduced to teachers all over Armenia. In addition, our reforestation work in rural villages has an educational component and our Michael and Virginia Ohanian Environmental Education Center at the Karin Nursery is a facility where students and professionals attend trainings and seminars on trees and the environment. The organization has also recently established the Michael and Virginia Ohanian Center for Environmental Studies in the Lori region.

ATP has been a proponent of working in collaboration with partners to promote an environmental ethic at all levels of society. In 2005, ATP worked with others to advocate for an alternative route to a proposed roadway to Iran through the middle of the Shikahogh Nature Reserve, where World Wildlife Fund had photographed a rare and endangered Caucasian Leopard living in the reserve. When the construction project became known to the public, ATP founder Carolyn Mugar and Armenian Assembly of America leader Hirair Hovnanian sent letters to the President and other officials urging them to hold public hearings and choose an alternate route.

ATP staff traveled to the site on fact-finding missions with scientific experts and journalists, and Carolyn Mugar traveled from the US on one of these visits. The ATP outreach office issued several press releases and action alerts via email about the endangered reserve, and commissioned a documentary film, funded in partnership with Armenian Forests NGO and World Wildlife Fund.

The coalition of more than 40 local and international NGOs and scientific organizations was successful in advocating for a decision to bypass Shikahogh, and the Minister of Transportation announced that the government had chosen a new route that bypassed the reserve.

We should give credit to the local leadership in Syunik, who had the courage to take a stand at great personal risk against the proposed roadway. It was also worthy of note that rather than taking credit for being responsive to the concerns of the public, the government made a point of explicitly announcing that their decision had nothing to do with the movement advocating for the road to go around the reserve. However, this may be the first time that the government responded adequately to concerns raised by the public. And the question now is, how can we leverage that success with other environmental issues within the country?

Reforestation Challenges

In its first 10 years of operation in Armenia, ATP has developed a significant range of knowledge and experiences. As it builds on successes and failures by moving toward large-scale reforestation, ATP has begun the process of appealing to international organizations for larger sources of funding.

The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund awarded ATP a major grant in 2006 to partner with Yale University’s Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry. Together, we have studied the forests in the corridor between Dilijan and Vanadzor, established a memorial forest in honor of Hrant Dink, and will publish Armenia’s first manual on sustainable forestry. Training will begin this year with local communities, university students, and professional foresters on how to manage the forests in a sustainable manner.

In addition, ATP has begun to focus its attention on some of the challenges of reforestation.
These include the need to work in cooperation with governmental agencies and local communities for securing access to land for reforestation, finding adequate supplies of local seed sources since most of the healthiest trees in the country have been harvested, and meeting the organization’s stringent site selection criteria. Sites are chosen based on a number of factors, including access to adequate water, protection from livestock grazing, and adequate protection measures against poaching and cutting.

And looking to the future, after more than 10 years of growth we are looking for new models for sustainability. Could the government provide the market for the trees grown in backyard nurseries? What is the potential for ecotourism and even “agro-tourism” programs? And what are some of the new ideas for the expansion of funding and new sources of investment in our programs?

After operating in Armenia for 15 years, it has become apparent that the constraints on reforestation are not merely financial. But ATP is dedicated to working with communities, organizations, governments, and individuals toward the goal of assisting the Armenian people in using trees to improve their standard of living and protect the environment, guided by the need to promote self-sufficiency, and aid those with the fewest resources first.

We are at a critical crossroad, and we have tried to illustrate the urgency of the situation--some of the key issues include the preservation of what little remains of our existing historic lands, the protection of agricultural lands from loss of topsoil caused by deforestation and erosion, the importance of land quality for subsistence farming, especially given Armenia’s geographic isolation, and a reminder that desertification is irreversible and fatal, as documented by writers including Jared Diamond of UCLA.

In conclusion, despite the urgency of the situation there are some very positive signs since the protection of the environment is a part of the laws of Armenia, there is improving cooperation between environmental NGOs in Armenia, and ATP’s job creation and poverty reduction programs have been received enthusiastically and are expanding throughout the country.

This article was adapted from a presentation made at the Student Summit at Harvard University on the Role of Diasporas in Armenia’s Development. Jeff Masarjian is executive director and Jason Sohigian is deputy director of the Armenia Tree Project.

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