EU Black Sea Environment Program: Armenia needs to create a new  cadastre of water resources

ArmInfo. Today Yerevan hosted a "round table"  within the framework of the EU "Common Efforts to Protect the  Environment of the Black Sea Basin Countries" program. The conference  was attended by representatives of Armenia, Georgia, Moldova.  

The program implemented as part of the cross-border cooperation of the  Eastern Neighborhood countries was approved in 2021 and runs until  2027. It aims to improve the well-being of people in the Black Sea  Basin region through sustainable growth and joint environmental  protection.

Representatives of various non-governmental organizations shared  their experience and tools for the implementation of environmental  programs at the conference. The Armenian participants of the program  emphasized the implementation of measures aimed at the ecological  preservation of water resources and the preservation of the  ecological cleanliness of the Lake Sanaa basin. The need to  strengthen measures for the treatment of wastewater and lake shores  from solid waste was discussed.

A well-known expert on water resources, Knarik Hovhannisyan, noted  the urgent need to create a new cadastre of water resources in  Armenia in order to have a correct idea of how much water is in the  country.  According to her, global warming leads to a decrease in  water resources and the statistical figure of the formation of water  resources in Armenia in the amount of 8 billion cubic meters per year  is overestimated and does not correspond to reality. According to  her, today we can talk about an indicator of 7.2 billion cubic  meters.

The "round table" also discussed the need to establish a so-called  solid waste recycling process and, first of all, a plastic recycling  process. In this vein, the experience of the "Urban" program in the  Armenian city of Kapan was presented, where in 2018 a project was  launched to process plastic and produce building materials from them,  such as plastic slate and street curbs, obtained from sand with  melting plastic sticking it together. These building materials are  already widely used in municipal construction sites. The program  budget amounted to about 750 thousand euros, of which 510 thousand  were provided by the EU, the rest were provided by the government of  Armenia and the municipality of Kapan.  It was mentioned at the  conference that the garbage sorting policy in Armenia has not become  stable yet.  According to the OSCE, the main water pollutants in  Armenia are plastic containers, bottles and bags.  About 5,000 tons  of plastic waste accumulate in Armenia every year, and the country  annually imports more than 600 tons of plastic bags and produces more  than 200 tons of this environmentally hazardous product.