Enhancing Financial Sustainability of the Protected Areas System in Georgia

summary

Georgia is one of the few countries globally where protected areas are a genuine high level national priority. Significant progress is made with the expansion of the protected areas network in the past decades, supported by legislative-institutional reforms, and the country is committed to increase the area under formal protection to 20% protection (from current 8%) in the next 8 years. Despite progress made, threats to globally significant biodiversity in Georgia from socio-economic development as well as climate change are exacerbated by ineffective implementation and enforcement of legislation and policies on Protected Areas.

With funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), twelve target protected areas will get sustainable financing to support operating costs, site-level technical assistance and capacity building, on financial-administrative planning, budgeting and accounting, tourism development, management effectiveness assessment, and operational management. Awareness raising improves societal acceptance and support of protected areas.

what we do

In close cooperation with relevant stakeholders we work to:

  •  Ensure sustainable and effective financing of twelve protected areas covering 431,872 ha with globally important biodiversity
  •  Improve institutional capacity for financial and operational management, and for monitoring in target protected areas
  •  Strengthen knowledge management and monitoring and evaluation which contributes to increased awareness of biodiversity values

Contact information

Address

UN House
9, Eristavi Street
Tbilisi 0179 Georgia

Contact person

Irakli Goradze
Project Coordinator
irakli.goradze@undp.org 

Nino Antadze
UNDP Environment and Energy Team Leader
nino.antadze@undp.org