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Permaculture sites will help reduce negative environmental impacts by promoting sustainable local food production and reducing the environmental and economic impacts of long-distance food transportation and importation. This project will promote social health and community cohesion through the adoption of permaculture ethics and most importantly will offer a way towards climate justice. It is expected to restore and get crops from the degraded land during the first year through simultaneously establishing both annual and perennial food growing systems. Although setting up perennial systems will take priority in the first year, it is planned to plant less annual crops and devote more time to putting in and maintaining perennials, which take a few years to establish their root systems before beginning to give harvests. Therefore, the harvest in the first year will not be as big as in subsequent years and each year the amount of harvest will increase in accordance with the increasing soil quality and establishing perennial systems which will no longer require any work other than pruning and harvesting. The annual systems produce a significant crop in the first year then die and need to be replanted from seed, while the perennial systems take time to establish and produce continuously larger crops every year following the third year with little maintenance required. Moreover, through partnership with the aforementioned schools for at least 5 years, new high-school students will be enrolled in the program annually to work on the land. As the content will be applicable to other lands in Armenia, afterwards we will be able to launch the same program without any more additional expenses. The seeds and other biodiversity genetic propagation material for setting up permaculture systems on other sites will be taken from these schools as they will have surplus.

The direct participants of the project are high school students and youth of Tatev community, including boys and girls, totaling to 60 participants. Special attention will be paid to women empowerment and the girls will be actively encouraged to participate.

The harvest created on site will be sold locally to individuals and in cooperation with local companies, restaurants and hotels. In the framework of the project, seed swap events will be organized to expand the seed bank. Seeds saved by participants will be exchanged for seeds of new varieties to increase the biodiversity of the site and to allow students to continuously have new varieties to grow. The students may also create their own brand of seeds as a project as there are few seed companies in Armenia and the diversity of varieties they offer is low. The project team will run an awareness-raising campaign as an in-kind contribution to distribute the same knowledge in less detail but to a larger audience. The content produced will be in the forms of social media video reels, educational posts and interactive stories with polls. All content will be available in Armenian. Based on past experience, the minimum organic number of views of the educational reels over the year is estimated to be 150,000 views. The Tatev Permaculture site will also be replicated on a smaller scale by 3 other schools in Syunik.

The high school students and local community members will be the main participants of the program. They will be provided gamified guidelines and content and guidance on permaculture methodology, principles and ethics in Armenian. They will fully participate in the whole process - from planning and design to implementation. They will work on the land, plan and create the design and will be guided on what to plant, when and how. Moreover, they?ll also learn how to maintain and continuously improve the system.

The new Armenian Permaculture Educational Program will first be implemented in schools in Tatev, Goris and Sisian. As it will be uploaded online it will later be used in other schools in other regions. We plan to organize the distribution of the harvest in a way that it can cover the expenses to run educational program in the school in Tatev, so there are students learning and reviving the land every year. Moreover, based on the program we will create online micro-learning videos for social media to raise awareness.

The project aims to introduce permaculture as a sustainable solution in Armenia which will contribute to the solution of the problems of land degradation, local food security and climate change. Based on the knowledge gained in Tatev, the project will be replicated it in 3 more schools in the same region.

The project is planning to increase the capacities of local youth and community members to implement permaculture-based solutions through the project-based learning program. The gamified guidelines and Armenian content on permaculture will be uploaded online, it will include multimedia content, such as photos, videos, illustrations, together with tests and practical exercises, including work on the land. Youth will learn to use specific software to create their own permaculture design for the specific area to be transformed. Afterwards the practical sessions will be held on the actual land plot on the land. The youth will be encouraged to start their own agricultural projects on the project site (i.e. their own seed brand, a seed bank, awareness raising campaign, creating wild bee habitats, conducting comparative research on certain permaculture methods vs industrial agriculture methods, etc.).