Information about the project, its phases and key milestones/outcomes

Within its strategy to promote enabling framework for introducing environment resilient practices, the Government of Armenia plans to significantly scale up the utilization level of green finance instruments and to secure a more pro-active participation of the private sector in implementing interventions in climate adaptation and mitigation domains.

Within that overall strategy, the Government of Armenia through the Ministry of Environment (Designated National Authority) has requested support of Green Climate Fund (GCF) within the framework of “Readiness and Preparatory Support Programme” to implement comprehensive assessment of the constraints for further expansion of “green finance” practices, mapping of available instruments and to come up with comprehensive set of methodological, awareness raising and capacity building interventions. The Readiness Project will design a Green Finance Roadmap, as key political document outlining current state, existing impediments for green finance development and establishing comprehensive vision for green finance strategy contributing to implementation of Armenia’s NDCs and Paris Agreement.

The Roadmap and further activities aimed at implementation of the activities proposed will benefit from Repository of “Green Finance Instruments” that will be compiled during project execution stage and further handed over to Central Bank for maintenance and updates upon completion of the Project. The main objective of the Readiness Project is to achieve paradigm shift in design and utilization of “green finance” instruments through incorporating into policies, operational modalities of national banks and non-banking financial institutions the climate-resilient approaches and guidelines, as well as regulatory simplification and introduction of policy incentives for designing respective on-lending facilities. To achieve this objective, interrelated chain of activity clusters, including assessment of baseline, regulatory review and simplification, assessment of best international practices, design of methodological baseline and further capacity building activities will be implemented.

The “ARMSWISSBANK” CJSC one of the leading Armenian banks that also seek accreditation with GCF (under direct access modality) has been awarded the contract for implementation of “Scaling up Green Finance Practices in the Republic of Armenia” Project.