Kristina Vardanyan: Yerevan Municipality`s greening program cost the  city  AMD 212 million and 10,000 withered saplings

ArmInfo. The Yerevan Municipality's greening program cost the city 212 million drams and 10,000 withered saplings, as stated by Kristina Vardanyan, a member  of the Yerevan Council of Elders and associate professor at the  Department of Hygiene and Ecology at YSMU, on her Facebook page. 

 According to her, while the municipality continuously reports in its  press releases about unprecedented, historic achievements of 60  hectares of new green spaces, one must exclude from this list the  "brilliant result" of 8.5 hectares of withered saplings, as well as  the chopped-down hectares of shade-providing green canopies.

"Taxpayers paid 212 million drams for this so-called greening, of  which 112 million drams were allocated by the Yerevan Municipality,  and the remainder by the Ministry of Environment of the Republic of  Armenia. I have repeatedly stated that the effectiveness of greening  is evaluated by the end result, not by programs ironically titled  'Planting and Felling Trees' or 'Try Again,'" Vardanyan noted.

The Council of Elders member called the reduction of green canopies  on Yerevan's streets by many thousands of square meters the most  "outstanding" achievement. "As a result, we got 8.5 hectares and  10,000 withered saplings," Vardanyan concluded.

Note, Armenian environmentalists have been sounding the alarm for the  third consecutive year that the municipality is committing ecocide in  the city for personal enrichment through money laundering in this  sector. Environmental experts tend to believe that the high level of  air pollution in the country today is driven by the failure to comply  with environmental standards during large-scale construction in the  capital, the felling of large, healthy trees by the municipality, and  their replacement with ornamental trees incapable of absorbing  equivalent emissions.