The Air Clears, the Problems Don’t: Inside Yerevan’s Pollution Crisis

Dust particles also found in the air over Yerevan have been attributed to the numerous construction sites across the city and to rock quarries outside the city. Man-made forest fires in Dilijan, as well as the practice of burning leaves in the city, have both been blamed for the higher rate of formaldehyde detected in the air.

Government (In)action

While experts have been raising the alarm on the mounting effects of car pollution for over a decade, authorities have been slow to enact legislation and even slower to enforce it. A recent study published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the European Union, which recommended a speedy and sustained electrification of Armenia’s road networks, also specifically cited the re-export of used catalytic converters as a major factor contributing to excessive air pollution across Armenia. The report called for tougher vehicle inspections, stricter customs checks on imports, and meaningful fines for those who bring in non-compliant cars. It also recommended a “green inspection” system that could reduce urban particulate pollution by up to 40% within 10 years, and urged Armenia to align its fuel and emissions standards with EU norms.

The Yerevan municipality has already been mulling the introduction of bans on cars lacking catalytic converters since the beginning of last year. “We’ve started to talk about this because we have the required equipment that has been showing significant deviations from the norm in winter months,” Mayor Avinyan told reporters last April.

Despite the promises, critics continue to accuse City Hall and the Armenian Government of dragging their feet on enforcing clear measures to ease the pollution situation. Yerevan residents, reinforced by some of the more active among the tens of thousands of Russian émigrés living in the city, have been mobilising on the grassroots level to advocate for change. An ad-hoc network of monitoring stations installed by private individuals across town has helped raise the alarm about the looming emergency while holding authorities accountable.

One concerned Russian transplant, industrial designer and hardware developer Kristina Loginova, went so far as to design and code her own air-quality monitoring device, fabricated from over-the-counter equipment ordered from AliExpress. To make the product easier to adopt, she drew on her design expertise and 3D-printed the box in the shape of a white cloud that adheres to a window. “The white cloud on your window doesn’t obstruct your view, but reminds you to check the air quality,” she explains. She has so far donated or sold over 80 units, mostly through word of mouth. These stations transmit data to the open-source database Armaqi.org.

Arsen Petrosyan, a Russian-Armenian repatriate and owner of one of Loginova’s cloud-shaped monitors, sees the air quality crisis as a catalyst for civic engagement. He observes that the air quality crisis has brought common cause between Armenian environmental activists and the tech-driven civic “maker culture” that Russian expats have introduced to the country. “Armenia still has a very nascent culture of providing feedback”, says the IT project manager who repatriated from Moscow three years earlier, “there is a preference for complaining in private, which reduces the chance of anything getting done.”

Petrosyan, who marched along with some two hundred activists, both Russian and Armenian, in late November to demand government action on the worsening air quality crisis, noted mixed attitudes from onlookers. While some told the Russians to go protest in their own country, others were genuinely curious about our complaints and our proposed solutions, he says. “Some local guys approached the protesters with camera phones, rudely heckling them until two Armenian-speaking girls among the protesters began addressing their questions and explained the situation. Their attitudes changed dramatically after that.”

The uneasy relationship that many of the transplant Russian environmental activists seemingly cultivated with indignant locals, often incensed at what researcher Maria Gunko dubbed “the Moscow gaze,” as in is the gaze of an arrogant subject, treads new ground in Yerevan’s future-history of urbanism. Shushan Grigoryan, a research fellow at the Institute for Security Analysis specifically referenced the fight against Yerevan’s air pollution in a study published on integration of Russian transplants into Armenian civic life. She described this form of civic participation as a “mode of political participation that occurred in less public settings but served as a means for them to disseminate their ideas and mobilize others.”

Despite growing demand for action, the municipality remains evasive on solutions. Mayor Avinyan claimed, in a December press conference, that industrial air quality monitoring stations which he had ordered in the wake of a previous public outcry show that human activity is responsible for only a small portion of the rise in pollution.

Still, over the winter, dust-retaining nets have quietly been installed around high-rise construction sites in the city, increased fines for burning leaves have been announced, and a new round of investment in electrified public-transport solutions has been announced. A tender process is exploring options to replace the fire-prone Nubarashen landfill with a modern recycling facility. The national government also set up an ‘anti-pollution taskforce’. Yet, air monitoring websites for Yerevan continue to recommend avoiding outdoor exercise, wearing masks outside, closing windows, and running air purifiers. The march, which Petrosyan attended, was not met by any representative of the municipal government. Yerevan isn’t the first municipality to face chronic smog issues, yet questions remain as to whether lessons learned elsewhere will be studied in the city older than Rome.