By Geghetsik Voskanyan
Armenia’s forests sustain rural livelihoods and protect soils and water. Preserving those benefits requires investment in existing forests and support for families who depend on firewood, a World Bank specialist said.
Dr. Irina Ghaplanyan, a senior climate change specialist at the World Bank’s Yerevan office, said stronger enforcement against illegal logging must go hand in hand with affordable heating alternatives and sustained investment in forest management.
“We need to make it possible for families to use less wood while keeping their homes warm,” she said in answers to CivilNet’s written questions. “Access to gas or electricity alone does not solve the problem if a household cannot afford the equipment or the heating bill.”
Those benefits extend beyond fuelwood. Forests support rural incomes through berries, mushrooms, medicinal plants and honey. They also protect soils, limit sediment entering water systems and support nature-based tourism.
Armenia is hosting COP17 in Yerevan from October 19 to 30, bringing together parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to assess progress and advance measures to protect nature.
Forests cover roughly 12% of Armenia’s territory. Unsustainable fuelwood harvesting and inadequate forest maintenance put pressure on these ecosystems.
For rural households that rely on wood for heating, Ghaplanyan recommended targeted assistance for efficient heating systems and home insulation, tailored to local energy supplies and families’ ability to pay. Where fuelwood remains necessary, legal access should be practical and harvesting kept within ecological limits.
Alongside support for households, she said the government’s first budget priority should be strengthening its capacity to protect and manage existing forests, including the workforce, equipment and management systems of Hayantar, the state forest management organization.
Forest expansion should proceed alongside this work on carefully selected sites, with suitable species and funding for long-term care, she said. Communities could also earn income from restoration, nurseries and sustainable forest products.
When vegetation and soils are damaged, rainfall can run off faster, carrying topsoil into rivers and reservoirs and worsening erosion and slope-instability risks, she said. Water benefits must be assessed locally: rainfall, soils, tree species and withdrawals affect outcomes, so forest protection does not guarantee more water in every catchment.
These wider benefits should inform public spending. Ghaplanyan recommended incorporating restoration, monitoring and maintenance into multi-year budgets and ecosystem accounts, helping authorities compare preventive investment with the costs of damage to farms, water infrastructure and communities.
The economic case needs careful explanation. An estimate valuing Armenia’s forest ecosystems at about $3.9 billion is dominated by the value assigned to carbon already stored in forests, Ghaplanyan said.
“It is not an annual income figure or money Armenia could automatically earn from carbon markets,” she said.
Reliable forest data would underpin both management and financing. Satellite classifications can mistake shrubs or crops for forests, Ghaplanyan cautioned. Greener landscapes or apparent gains in tree cover do not, by themselves, establish whether forests are regenerating well or retaining their ecological quality.
“A reliable national inventory is an immediate priority because knowing how much land looks tree-covered is only part of knowing the condition of our forests,” she said.
With reliable data and sustained public funding in place, additional financing could help. Payments for ecosystem services, for example, could allow downstream water users to compensate upstream communities or forest managers for activities that deliver measurable water benefits.
For these arrangements to work, Ghaplanyan said, projects need clear land-management and contracting rights, a fair way to share benefits with communities, credible measurement and an enforceable contract with a willing buyer. Expected revenue must also exceed preparation and verification costs.
Carbon projects must demonstrate additional results and address fire risk, loss of stored carbon and the risk that protecting one area shifts cutting elsewhere.
“We should prepare a small number of pilots, verify these conditions project by project, and keep core forest management funded through public budgets and grants,” she said.
The ultimate measure is lasting recovery. “We should judge success by surviving trees and recovering forest functions, rather than planting numbers alone,” Ghaplanyan said.
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