Kanach Yerevan

Legal Frameworks and Proposed Reforms for Urban Green Spaces

This page serves as a comprehensive resource for understanding the legal landscape governing urban green spaces in Yerevan. We aim to highlight existing regulations and advocate for essential reforms to safeguard our city's vital ecological infrastructure.

Advocating for Systemic Change

Kanach Yerevan is actively engaged in proposing critical amendments to existing regulations and drafting new legislation to ensure the long-term health and biodiversity of Yerevan's urban trees. Our ongoing efforts focus on implementing systemic changes for the benefit of our city's ecological future.

  • Make tree cutting procedure transparent. The changes propose that (1) it's not enough to inspect the trees by eye to decide if they need to be cut, (2) the commission which inspects trees for cutting should include public representatives, (3) all cutting decisions should be publicly available, and (4) there should be a 30-day execution delay, for the public to appeal the decision.

International codes

These additional standards are highly relevant but require purchase for access:

Soviet codes

  • Gosstroy rules for green space management, defines essential guidelines for management, pruning procedures, and overall maintenance. This foundational document significantly influenced green space management in many post-Soviet republics, including Armenia.

Armenian codes

  • Law of the Republic of Armenia on Plant World (from 23.11.1999), in Armenian.
    The main framework law, obliges municipalities to ensure the protection and integrity of natural plant communities.
  • Forest Code of the Republic of Armenia (from 24.10.2005), in Armenian.
    This is about forest, but often its articles are applied by analogy to urban plantations.
  • Law of RA on tariffs for compensation of damage to animal and plant world.
    Establishes fines for damage to vegetation and the formula for their calculation. Unfortunately, the fines are very low and are established only for damage "up to the degree of growth cessation", i.e. plant death. Simple damage, in which the plant continues to live, including barbaric topping, is a violation, but does not provide algorithms for calculating the fine.

Decisions of the Yerevan City Council:

  • 2/4-4-N from 18.11.2009 (PDF, HY/EN/RU) on the approval of the rules for the preservation and use of green spaces of general use in the city of Yerevan.
  • 36N from 18.11.2009 (PDF, HY/EN/RU) almost identical to the one above, not sure why.
  • 337N from 12.02.2021 (PDF, HY/EN/RU) adds new rules on protecting trees during construction works.