The FORACCA project, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation SDC, supports forest landscape restoration efforts and contributes to climate change adaptation in Armenia. Through the FORACCA project, Switzerland supports the Government of Armenia in advancing a sustainable and climate-resilient future by restoring and monitoring forests, empowering communities and protecting biodiversity.

The project is being implemented in close cooperation between the Forest Alliance, a coalition of four leading NGOs engaged in Armenian forest landscape restoration, the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations FAO.

In collaboration with Armenian, Swiss and international partner organizations, WSL is working to advance science and inclusive action for climate resilience and sustainable forest management in Armenia. The combination of international and local implementing partners reflects the project’s aspirations of strengthening international knowledge-exchange and increasing local capacities and know-how in sustainable ways.

The project is aimed both at the national and at the local level. Nationally, the objective is to strengthen capacities, data-availability and policy-frameworks related to forest management, forest monitoring and climate change adaptation. At the same time, the project aims to empower local communities to engage in forest landscape restoration, adopt climate-resilient agricultural practices such as agroforestry, and effectively adapt to climate chang.

FORACCA aims to bring critical climate-change and forest-related knowledge to Armenia, in the form of climate scenarios and local climate impact profiles, which will be shared with practitioners, academia and governmental partners to improve the management of landscapes and natural resources against the backdrop of future climatic changes. The project takes a transdisciplinary approach to develop innovative and localized solutions together with local beneficiaries. It empowers local NGOs and communities to engage in community-forestry and agroforestry, that has the potential to improve biodiversity, water availability and general agricultural productivity. By supporting communities’ climate-resilient development, FORACCA furthermore aims to decrease people’s vulnerabilities, strengthen the role of women in environmental governance, include and empower vulnerable minority groups and decrease poverty in target villages. 

The Forest Restoration and Climate Change in Armenia” (FORACCA) project is funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). The project is implemented by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research (WSL) in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss, Planval, the Armenian National Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (ARNAP), Zoï Environment Network and Shen NGO as well as the Forest Alliance of Armenia as well as the Forest Alliance of Armenia.