Despite protests by environmentalists, additional water releases from Lake Sevan will continue

ArmInfo. Despite protests by environmentalists, the National Assembly of Armenia, at an extraordinary meeting on August 28, made amendments to the law on the approval of the annual and comprehensive programs for the restoration, preservation, reproduction and use of the Lake Sevan ecosystem, providing for an additional 40 million cubic meters .m water release from the lake. 68 MPs voted for the document and one MP abstained from voting.

According to the Chairman of the Water Committee of Armenia Inessa Babayan, the bill provides for increasing water releases from Lake Sevan from the current 170 million to 210 million cubic meters. This, according to Babayan, is necessary to provide farmers with sufficient volumes of irrigation water. It was also reported that International Energy Corporation CJSC, which uses lake water as fuel for the Sevan- Hrazdan cascade of HPPs, as well as CJSC "Electric Networks of Armenia'', are obliged to transfer all of its proceeds from the use of an additional 40 million cubic meters of water to to the off-budget fund of the government. The minister continued that in the past year, an additional 100 million cubic meters of water was released from the lake, which allowed accumulating 1.6 billion drams in the off-budget fund. It is planned to use these funds for solving ecological problems of Sevan, including the construction of new water treatment plants.

To note, the parliament session took place at the background of a protest organized by the civil initiative "SOS Sevan". The participants of the action demanded to completely stop the water intake from the lake.  Earlier, the chairman of the "Association for Sustainable Development" NGO Karine Danielyan noted that the current state of Sevan Lake is not a coincidence. "I consider it the lake's cry for help, we have been alarming for years: if we continue to treat Sevan like this, instead of a lake we will have a swamp, and water will not be suitable even for irrigation." Now we are faced with this problem. the active reproduction of blue-green algae is an indicator that the lake is actively approaching water logging. In that part of the water where there is active flowering, there are also poisonous substances, "she noted. The ecologist indicated that Lake Sevan has faced flowering process since 1964, every 2-3 years, but never the scale was the same as now. Karine Danielyan explained that the flowering in the lake is due to several factors:  biological, lack of physicochemical water treatment stations, these stations failed after the collapse of the USSR, as well as a decrease in the water level in the lake and high air temperature. "Every year, we raise the issue of inadmissibility of solving irrigation problems at the expense of water releases from Lake Sevan." If we lose Sevan, we will lose Armenia, "added K. Danielyan.