Armenia hosts United Nations (UN) conference on biodiversity and announces course for entry into the European Union (EU). The experience of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe shows how much practice differs from promises, writes in his article for the Romanian edition of the American magazine Newsweek - Newsweek România, the former Deputy Prime Minister for Climate Policy and Minister of Environment and Water in the government of Kiril Petkov (2021-2022) Borislav Sandov.
On October 19, the seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP17) opens in Yerevan, at which countries will conduct a global review of the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework Program (KMGBF) for the first time.
This is not indifferent to the European Union (EU): Armenia is joining the “Eastern Partnership”, created at the initiative of Poland and Sweden. Already in 2025, the Armenian parliament adopted a law to initiate the process of accession to the European Union. Therefore, the South Caucasian country should be compared to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which in the 1990s inherited the same problems: mines, clogged sewers, cut down forests.
The question of whether Armenia could not only be a venue for the forum, but also set an example, has been asked for more than a year.
Ecologist Ruben Khachatryan wrote in May 2025 in The Revelator that his country is “far from a model” in terms of caring for nature. In the fall of the same year, Khachatryan, in his article for
EVN Report, mentioned politics as the main threat to Armenia, since it suggests that the mining sector prevails over ecology.
In the report of the “Heinrich Böll” Foundation "competing interests of the mining and energy sectors" are analyzed. At the same time, the Armenian investigative media Hetq wrote in July 2026 that in the run-up to COP17, Armenia is making "ambitious promises that are hard to believe". A week before the opening of the conference, the forecasts are pessimistic.
Just a quarter of a century ago, the dams in the Romanian city of Baia Mare broke, and cyanide runoff reached its delta along the Tisza and Danube rivers. After that, the Czech Republic, Germany and Hungary banned cyanide leaching. Romania then abandoned the development of the gold deposit in Rosiere-Montana: the site was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List, and the investors' multi-billion dollar lawsuit was rejected by the arbitration court in 2024.
However, Armenia is entering into partnerships with mining companies. The state has a 12.5% stake in the company "Lydian Armenia", which is preparing a project to develop a mine in the Amulsar deposit near the resort of Jermuk. As a state representative in the company since September 2025, former minister and member of the leadership of the ruling party Gnel Sanosyan has been working. The commissioning, as mentioned by the Minister of Economy of Armenia Gevorg Papoyan, was supposed to be scheduled for September 2026 - just before the eco-conference. Gold is to be extracted using sodium cyanide.
In addition, as stated in a note on the UN website in Armenia, for 2024, only 9 out of 24 mining companies operating in the country have submitted environmental monitoring reports. Neighboring countries have imposed bans on the use of cyanide after similar environmental incidents. Meanwhile, Armenia has become a shareholder in a cyanide mine - part of an industry that generally does not even take into account its impact on the environment.
The water situation in Armenia is bad even if we ignore the cyanide problem. Hungary has stopped the eutrophication (cyanide extraction - editor's note) of Lake Balaton, reducing the phosphorus load and thus restoring the water-marsh system of the Kish-Balaton nature reserve.
In the EU, over 90% of urban runoff is treated according to a single standard for all. In Armenia, according to EVN Report data, in 2021 only about 8% of urban runoff underwent mechanical treatment, and less than one percent underwent biological treatment.
The EU and Germany have provided about 6 million euros for the program for the protection of Lake Sevan in Armenia (EU4Sevan). Among the goals of the program is the treatment of runoff, but in the 2024 programming document, Brussels again wrote about the pollution of Sevan with untreated runoff. The stations by the lake are still only mechanical, the government promises to launch biological treatment in its program for 2026-2031. Sevan represents the most obvious failure of Armenia's environmental policy.
As for forests, it is not clear what estimates could be taken as a basis. Poland increased afforestation from 21% in 1945 to over 29% now. Armenia promises to practically double its forests by the middle of this century, but the last inventory of the forest fund was carried out in 1993. The promise to double the forests is based on figures that are missing and on the planting of trees that lag behind any plans.
Only 13% of the territory in Armenia is under protection, with the goal set to reach 20% by 2030. At the same time, the global program has taken as a guideline that protected areas in the world should be about 30%. In the EU, over a quarter of the land is under protection as territories. Member States such as Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Croatia already protect over 30% of their territories.
The effects of consistent protection of protected areas can be seen in examples such as the bison: by 1927 they were almost extinct in the wild. But this species was restored by twelve founding animals, and the largest free population, about a thousand individuals, lives today in the Białowieża Forest Reserve in Poland.
At the same time, in Armenia, according to EVN Report, only between 8 and 13 leopards remain. Armenia is far from achieving its own indicators, which are already more modest than those accepted worldwide, and its rarest species remain on the verge of extinction.
Compliance with the norms depends on supervision. In the EU, anyone who creates obvious threats to nature is obliged to take precautionary measures to prevent damage.
In July, the Yerevan newspaper Hetq wrote that during the preparation of the Expo Center in Yerevan for COP17, piles of soil were dumped into the gorge of the Hrazdan River. This is how they fill up the riverbed and damage the trees. Back in July, the Yerevan municipality confirmed that declaring the gorge a protected area was among Armenia's commitments under COP17. An on-site inspection found the dumping of construction waste, but terminated the inspection on the grounds that the trees had not dried up, the riverbed had not changed. Accordingly, there was no "measurable damage". For the entire year of 2025, the Armenian environmental inspection recorded 3,303 violations, which is 30% more than the previous year. But even the obvious case of the venue of the upcoming conference is nowhere near enough.
Funding is also not enough. The EU institutions have agreed to provide about 10% of the annual expenses in the union's budget for biodiversity in 2026 and 2027. According to preliminary estimates by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Armenia needs about $960 million for its action plan until 2030, with additional sources needed for 93% of this amount. The government's decision estimates the costs of holding the conference itself at about $25 million. Money was found for the conference, but there is almost no such money for nature in the country.
Over the past year, the questions to the host of the world's leading eco-conference have only increased. These include the cyanide mine on top of the UN conference, the untreated runoff around Lake Sevan, the forest fund that has not been revised since 1993, a nature conservation plan with a 90% deficit, as well as the closed inspection of the construction site at the Expo Center, which will host the notorious World Environmental Forum.
Work is not poverty. Every time environmental standards clash with the interests of the sector and the influential mining oligarchs, the standards take a back seat. The shores of Lake Sevan have been overdeveloped for years, and the former head of the Armenian Nature Conservation Inspectorate, Artur Grigoryan, warned of corruption schemes in mining back in 2019. But today the authorities in Yerevan are securing a share in a large-scale cyanide project themselves.
The global review will not punish Armenia for all this: according to the rules written in the convention, such audits are carried out “in a non-punitive manner”.
The approach will be different during the possible negotiations on Armenia’s accession to the EU: there they will check whether treatment facilities have been built, whether there is monitoring of the forest fund and whether the relevant inspections are carried out regularly. The country adopts a law on approximation with the European Union, but each time it cedes its nature to private interests. Thus, Armenia is heading towards the EU on a hypocritical path. While Eastern Europe has had to go through this difficult path from and to.