Armenia, which is highly vulnerable to climate change, has signed up to increase its forest cover and carbon removal from forests by reducing fuelwood demand and by introducing sustainable and climate-adaptive forest management techniques.

This is envisaged through a forestry project of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the first large-scale FAO project in Europe and Central Asia to be supported by the Green Climate Fund (GCF). The project aims to increase forest cover by 2.5 percent, reduce the fuelwood demand of rural communities by at least 30 percent, enable sustainable and climate-adaptive forest management, and ensure technology transfer to rural communities, the private sector and institutions as part of a forest-energy nexus approach. The eight-year project, with a total budget of USD 18.7 million, will rely on significant co-financing and technical expertise from the Government of Armenia, the Austrian Development Agency, the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, Italy, the World Wildlife Fund Armenia, and FAO.