Video: Project Goals
The project led to other positive developments for ATP. The German Development Bank, KFW, recently awarded a major grant to WWF Armenia, which is working with ATP to plant 1.3 million trees in northern Armenia.
Video: Leveraging the CEPF Project
“This is the first time we’ve been offered the opportunity to undertake a project of this size and scope, and the logistics have been quite challenging,” Yeghiayan says. ATP is planting 438,000 conifers this spring, and the balance of mixed hardwoods in the fall.
“This project was made possible as a result of our successful collaboration with Yale’s Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry on the CEPF grant, which brought a great deal of credibility to ATP as an organization that creates tangible results on the ground in Armenia.”
ATP is putting the final touches on the Armenian version of the manual, which will be distributed widely to all interested parties. In addition, Chadwick Oliver, director of Yale’s Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry, has indicated his interest in having Yale publish the manual in English for further distribution in the United States.
ATP collaboration with Yale is continuing on another front as well. A private donor is sponsoring Zachary Parisa, the Yale graduate student who conducted the field work and wrote much of the manual, to go to Armenia this summer and begin a series of training seminars on how best to implement community-based sustainable forestry. He will be using the manual as the centerpiece for the training.
Download: Sustainable Forestry Manual, Republic of Armenia, English (PDF – 16 MB)
And how are the forestry plots doing? The current survival rate is more than 90 percent. ATP is using these sites for observational purposes, so that newly trained foresters in Armenia can witness a proper planting scheme.
In April, ATP was announced as the national winner from Armenia of the Energy Globe Award for Sustainability. The award was in the youth category for their environmental education program, in particular their innovative environmental education curriculum “Plant an Idea, Plant a Tree,” which serves as a teacher manual helping secondary-school science teachers introduce environmental education into Armenia’s school system.
ATP is working with the Ministry of Education to finalize the curriculum as a required part of standard coursework, and introduce it to more than 5,000 school teachers beginning in 2010.