By Christopher Crowson
Water resources in Armenia are highly vulnerable to climate change and the country is in extreme water stress due to excessive water use.
“Our water availability is going to go down,” Alen Amirkhanian, Director of the Acopian Center for the Environment at the American University of Armenia (AUA) and a principal investigator of the 2024 Water Sector Political Economy Analysis report, tells CivilNet.
Major factors contributing to water stress in Armenia are generally behavioural in nature and, therefore, up to average citizens, private enterprises and government policymakers to make improvements.
Water use in Armenian agriculture
Agriculture is by far Armenia’s thirstiest industry, comprising almost 90% of the country’s water consumption.
Garabet Kazanjian, a water specialist and an assistant professor at AUA, says that Armenia’s exceptionally high rates of water use in agriculture are, in fact, in accordance with global water usage trends.
“Armenia is more or less in line with most developing countries worldwide… most developing countries are more agriculture based in terms of their economies. Yes, there are a lot of inefficiencies but we fit within the worldwide scope of how water is used,” Kazanjian tells CivilNet.
Irrigation
Armenian irrigation systems, which play a massive role in the country’s agricultural sector, have several issues that lead to a waste of water resources.
“A lot of the water transport is open channel, so there’s a lot of evaporation that happens. It’s mostly not going through pipes, it’s going through canals… The infrastructure is old, so there is a lot of leakage and waste that happens in the process… there’s massive loss by the time it gets to the farm,” says Amirkhanian.
Much of the irrigation infrastructure in the country has not been updated since the Soviet era. Based on calculations from different years, up to half of irrigation water is lost before reaching its endpoint.
Fish farming
Fish farming is another major source of water waste in Armenian agriculture. CivilNet reported that it accounts for nearly 80% of the annual water usage in the Ararat valley, Armenia’s most agriculturally productive region.
Amirkhanyan says that the amount of water that’s being extracted for fisheries is equivalent to all the water which is being wasted per year in the water distribution system.
“This is very precious, high-quality water that we’re bringing out, growing a few fish and then directing it towards the Araks river,” he notes.
Echoing his colleague, Kazanjian tells CivilNet that fish farming is depleting some of Armenia’s best water reserves.
The underground water found below the Ararat valley only requires minimal treatment before it is safe enough to be used as drinking water. The misuse of this high-quality water risks producing an endless chain of negative ecological consequences in the country.
“When you have groundwater levels going down, there are several other risks you’re facing. One is you are increasing the risks of desertification because there is not enough moisture from underground coming up,” says Kazanjian, adding that now villagers have to dig much deeper to access water.
With the significant decline of underground water levels, farmers are now required to make use of electric pumps to reach this once easily-accessible resource. Moreover, after having obtained the water, they then may even need to treat it due to a potential deterioration in its quality. As a result, groundwater acquisition in the Ararat valley is becoming increasingly complicated and expensive.
Reduced water availability
Amirkhanian warns that “we have to think about significantly improving the efficiency of water use because our water availability is going to go down. There are two big pressures: climate change and Turkey’s construction of dams upstream. [These phenomena] are going to reduce water availability for agriculture.”
According to their report, the 2040 projections under the business-as-usual scenario are that many parts of Armenia will experience high to extremely high levels of water stress. This will have implications for Armenia’s food, energy, and economic security.
Possible solutions
Kazanjian asserts that a cost-benefit analysis is necessary when addressing the issue. He notes that fish farming only contributes a mere 2% to Armenia’s overall GDP, therefore, policymakers need to ask whether such a small figure is worth risking the country’s national security?
He also believes the government’s current subsidies for water irrigation are inefficient.
“Irrigation water is heavily subsidised by the government and it is a blanket subsidy because everybody pays the same amount, so if you’re a very big company, you are paying the same amount as a very small farmer who is trying to survive day in day out. Usually, whenever there are discussions about raising the price of the water to get more money for infrastructural repairs or reforms, the argument thrown on the table is ‘but if we raise the prices, a lot of the farmers that are already struggling to survive will have more issues.’ ”
Moreover, he advocates for increased collaboration between farmers on a local level in order to combat water mismanagement in agriculture. As farming tends to be on an individual basis and small-scale in Armenia, farmers rarely band together to resolve any challenges they face. According to Kazanjian, such collaboration would certainly help with water distribution and storage efforts.
Amirkhanian spoke about the potential of making drip irrigation a more widespread method among farmers. Drip irrigation “is the slow, even application of low-pressure water to soil and plants using plastic tubing placed directly at the plants root zone.” It allows for efficient water use since almost no water is lost because of runoff, deep percolation or evaporation.
Despite its advantages, he noted that for drip irrigation to be effective, farmers need a constant and reliable water supply system. In Armenia, however, farmers tend to only have sporadic access to water. As a result, when the government introduced incentives for farmers to adopt drip irrigation, many did not simply because they could not. Only those with the space and/or the financial resources had the potential to build their own reservoirs and install such irrigation systems.
Kazanjian also put forward the construction of irrigation wetlands, artificially constructed wetlands which can be used to irrigate farmland. This irrigation technique, which is becoming more internationally renowned, has numerous benefits, including storing large quantities of high-quality water, providing a home for high levels of biodiversity and promoting important processes such as carbon sequestration – a process which reduces carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and thus directly combats climate change.
These solutions need attention from both governmental and private industry. Armenia has a serious water management issue in its agricultural sector and the country’s overall water stress levels will undoubtedly increase if no changes are introduced, especially in the face of the ever-worsening consequences of climate change. Action needs to be taken now and across all levels of civil society, otherwise the county’s food security, energy supply and economic stability will all be under severe threat.
