LESSONs LEARNED
Funding provided by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund enabled the Armenia Tree Project to produce sustainable forestry training models that are replicable and adaptable to local conditions through the use of advanced analytical techniques and community capacity building.
Jeff Masarjian, Executive Director, Armenia Tree Project
What was the most important lesson learned?
The most important lesson learned was discovering how challenging the concept of sustainability is given different stakeholder perspectives.
Describe how you learned this and whether / how you have adapted your approach or specific project elements as a result.
The concept for this project was to learn, introduce and apply fundamentals of sustainable forestry to communities in Northern Armenia. With the assistance of Yale University’s Global Institute for Sustainable Forestry, Armenia Tree Project set out to examine the current state of forestry and what steps could be taken to ensure the long-term health of these forests.
Our original concept of sustainability was much more rooted in conservation than what was presented to us by Yale. We learned about forestry management techniques and planting strategies that challenged our preconceived notions.
We also learned a great deal about the best ways to plant a variety of species to ensure their survival, but also to maximize the timber and non-timber benefits for future use.
We took these lessons and applied them to different stakeholder perspectives (livestock owners, villagers dependent on the forest for survival, forestry personnel who lack the resources to properly manage the forests) and developed a community forestry manual. The manual provides detailed steps to take to ensure mutually beneficial outputs by working with often opposing stakeholders to develop planting and management plans that balance the multivariable needs that people have on the forest and natural resources in general.
- June 9, 2009
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