From Myth to Management: How Armenia’s High Altitude Water Towers, Once Guarded by Dragon Stones, Can Still Protect Economies and People
Water feeds our culture, language, and histories as much as it feeds our ecosystems, economies, and livelihoods. Water runs through our music, such as the Delta blues, born from the slow-moving Mississippi, or through visual art, like Claude Monet’s Water Lilies brushed gently over a pond and Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa arcing over a frothy sea. Depending on the week, one may describe oneself as afloat or sinking, drowning in sorrow, or having found themselves in hot water. Painters brush blue into green; poets memorialize waves making their way toward the pebbled shore; politicians set regulations; engineers build aqueducts; and somewhere a child splashes quietly in a stream, asking where the water has come from, and why it has suddenly dried up in the heat.
Meanwhile, national water codes enumerate the physical forms through which we attempt to manage it: dams, dikes, embankments, canals, channels, wells, pipelines, pumping plants, purification plants, water outlets, spillways, aqueducts, and reservoirs. Our cultural, relational, and political meditations on water are as endless as our infrastructure. How we then choose to manage the stock and flow of freshwater is and remains a primary human concern.
To pay attention to the problem of water is to begin to situate oneself squarely within these intertwined histories: engineering, governance, ecology, and culture. It is also about understanding how decisions shape not only the physical flow of rivers but the emotional currents that define who we are and how we belong to a place. The 2025 World Water Development Report underscores the urgency of this connection, one that is increasingly threatened by climate change and growing demands on water resources. The report says that globally, investment and infrastructure for water and sanitation will need to accelerate dramatically, by as much as tenfold, highlighting the need for more focused technical and policy responses to improve how water is managed.1
Currently, many water management plans focus primarily on identifying the challenges of maintaining a clean and reliable supply, balancing the often competing interests and needs of farmers, fisheries, hydropower, and growing cities. Yet these strategies frequently overlook the essential role that intact upstream ecosystems—forests, high-mountain landscapes, and protected areas—play in sustaining that supply in the first place. The 2025 report suggests that one place to begin is in high-altitude landscapes, the world’s “water towers” that provide essential freshwater services to downstream communities.
It is no wonder, then, that one compelling example of this approach can be found in Armenia, one of the world’s most ancient civilizations, and a country where water is both material and mythic. A place where scattered across green steppe grasses stand Dragon Stones, otherwise known as Vishaps (վիշապ), named after the serpentine beings of Armenian folklore who are said to patrol high-altitude lakes, rivers, and mountain springs.
Sometime toward the end of the fifth millennium BC, these stones (quarried, sculpted, and polished from single pieces of basalt, and weighing up to seven tons) were hauled up steep mountain slopes by the pre-Urartian communities living below.2 Their strategic placement near springs, streams, and seasonal snowmelt was to honor and safeguard the sources of clean water flowing downstream—water that sustained irrigation-fed agriculture. However, until recently, maintaining this ancient ethos has proved a challenge in modern water management.
The challenge, in part, is that while Armenia’s economy may have diversified, it remains heavily reliant on water-related sectors including tourism, horticulture, agriculture, aquaculture, and hydropower generation, which together contribute more than 25 percent of the country’s economy. In the Ararat Basin alone, water supports roughly $270 million in annual economic activity, largely through irrigated agriculture, fish farms, and hydroelectric power. Climate change threatens this delicate balance, with some headwaters (where rivers originate) projected to lose up to 18 percent of their flow by the end of the century. Rising temperatures, increasingly inconsistent rainfall, and aging Soviet-era infrastructure only compound the challenge.
However, a new analysis is helping to update river basin management plans, and in doing so re-incorporating the role of the forests and high-altitude protected areas where the Vishaps still stand. Though perhaps not as immediately evocative as “dragon stones,” a team of scientists and economists used a natural capital assessment to demonstrate this relationship. Quantifying the connection in both biophysical and monetary terms, the researchers examined exactly how much downstream sectors rely on the maintenance of a key ecosystem service provided by these upstream ecosystems: maintaining baseflow, the steady underground water that sustains rivers during dry months.
When upland forests and mountain ecosystems are degraded, they hold less soil in place, increasing sediment and pollutants in streams and rivers. At the same time, less water is able to slowly filter through the ground, reducing the steady underground flows that maintain reliable streamflow later in the season. This dimension of water availability is often overlooked, yet it can quickly become costly: hydropower reservoirs become clogged with sediment, energy output declines, and agricultural irrigation becomes less predictable.
Through a combination of hydrologic mapping and economic analysis, the team created what they termed a “Water Value Index” (WVI), a new tool to identify not only where baseflow originates, but also how different land uses or potential climate and management scenarios could enhance or threaten these flows. In the Ararat Basin, their findings showed that upstream forests and protected areas generate more than 200 million cubic meters of water per year, enough to fill roughly 80,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. Using the InVEST Seasonal Water Yield (SWY) model, the team pinpointed that most of this baseflow was originating from a specific mountainous region in the northeastern part of the basin. It is this water that flows downstream, feeding those numerous sectors that rely on (and derive substantial economic value from) the consistent availability of water.
The analysis showed that the greatest value of these flows was for irrigation, generating approximately 92.6 billion AMD per year (about $241 million USD), followed by fish farming (6.8 billion AMD, or approximately $18 million USD) and hydropower generation (5.5 billion AMD, approximately $14 million USD). Building out scenarios, the team was able to pinpoint how, for example, the Vedi River not only holds the highest water value among the basin’s rivers, but that maintaining its reliable baseflow will be a critical management consideration in order to continue supporting the highly productive agricultural sector.
So how exactly does this information serve water management in Armenia? In this case, it has provided evidence for decision-makers to anticipate changes in water flows due to climate change. It helps pinpoint where land and resource management interventions could be most effective. And, because the water-related value of many protected and forested areas will decline under business-as-usual resource management, the study highlights how and where improving local watershed conditions by reducing soil erosion or restoring natural ecosystems could help mitigate these projected losses.
To date, this information has already been integrated as a supplement to the Ararat River Basin Management Plan, with the long-term vision of incorporating a chapter on natural capital approaches into future water basin management plans, including the Sevan and Hrazdan Basins. These plans are due for revision in 2028—offering further opportunity to refine, expand, and institutionalize the approaches piloted in the Ararat Basin across the country.
Natural capital approaches underway in Armenia highlight the enduring connections between land and water, myth and measurement, and the shared language of science, economics, and policy.And the Vishaps, having watched snowmelt nourish early farmers and witnessed Roman cisterns and aqueducts fill, will, in the decades ahead, witness restoration efforts, reforestation, and the careful stewardship of these high-altitude water towers.
To think of water is to engage in a practice that extends beyond our own lifetimes, reaching back through millennia of ice melting, seas rising and receding, and the shifting flows that have shaped landscapes and human societies alike. It is to understand oneself as connected not only to the people and communities downstream, but to the land, the mountains, and the ecosystems through which water flows.
Further Reading & Resources
Final Report: 3Ps Armenia Final Project Report
Policy Brief: 3Ps Armenia Case Study
This initiative began under the global People, Planet, Prosperity (3Ps) project as a partnership between the Natural Capital Alliance at Stanford University (NatCap) - formerly the Natural Capital Project; Armenia’s Institute of Botany (part of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia); and the Asian Development Bank (ADB)—including the Principal Natural Resources and Agriculture Specialist and the Senior Climate Change Officer at ADB’s Armenia Resident Mission—in coordination with the Hydrometeorology and Monitoring Center of the Armenia Ministry of Environment (ArmHydromet).
UNESCO World Water Assessment Programme. (2025). The United Nations World Water Development Report 2025: Mountains and glaciers – Water towers. UNESCO, on behalf of UN-Water.
Gurzadyan, V., Bobokhyan, A. Vishap stelae as cult dedicated prehistoric monuments of Armenian Highlands: data analysis and interpretation. npj Herit. Sci. 13, 435 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-025-01998-z