The mountainous South Caucasus region encompassing Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia is home to about 16.8 million people, with nearly 40 percent residing in rural areas. Unsustainable agricultural practices, resource management, and overgrazing have contributed to soil degradation and desertification on over 50 percent of land. This landscape degradation is leading to the loss of local biodiversity at an alarming rate across the region's mountain ecosystems, forests, and wetlands. Additionally, decreasing land productivity and increasing poverty have led to the migration of rural populations, disruption of economic development, and aggravation of regional conflicts. 

PROGREEN supports a regional knowledge activity to enhance the knowledge, tools, and capacity of key stakeholders in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan for improved integrated landscape management. The activity will develop spatial maps of multi-risk hotspots using historical data and future climate modeling. Based on these projections and the evaluation of the costs of inaction, the project team will identify priority intervention areas across landscapes in the three countries. Activities will also cover the development of a biodiversity and ecosystem services modeling tool, training stakeholders on the application of the tool, and disseminating results. 

Grant activities, launched in October 2023, are now underway, starting with data collection to identify areas most affected by land degradation. This effort has enabled the assessment of costs to GDP resulting from inaction on land degradation across the three countries. In Armenia, the team worked with the Ministry of Economy of the Republic of Armenia to develop a Green Taxonomy Working Paper, including guiding the Ministry in developing the initial draft of the Legal Regulatory Act on Green Taxonomy. In Georgia, the team finalized the Georgia Green Growth Strategy working paper and shared it with the Ministry of Economic and Sustainable Development of Georgia.