The ceremony was attended by the Minister of Environment Protection and Agriculture of Georgia, Levan Davitashvili, the Deputy Minister, Iuri Nozadze, the Director of National Wildlife Agency, Revaz Bejashvili and UNDP-GEF Kura II Project National Coordinator, Maka Julakidze. The participants exchanged details about the ongoing project and expressed their wish to cooperate in the future too.

Minister Davitashvili reiterated that it is extremely important to rejuvanate  green spaces in Tbilisi and projects like this will always be welcomed by the ministry.

100 kW solar panel is one of the components of the project aiming to improve the situation in Krtsanisi Park, situated between the capital Tbilisi and neighboring city Rustavi, and belonging to Gardabani municipality. Krtsanisi park consists of about 210 hectares of an area, affected by a heavy sand-and-gravel extraction from the Kura riverbed for the last decades. 

The solar power plant installation is financed by UNDP-GEF Kura II project. The newly installed solar power plant will provide the park area with an environmentally friendly source of electricity. It will also provide electricity to the pump station, to be installed in the nearest future, to take water from Kura River and fill the 8 oxbow lakes of the Park, which were separated from the Kura River as a result of sand-and-gravel extraction. Pump station will also irrigate 50 ha of the forest trees in the Park.

As a continuation of Krtsanisi Park renovation plan, UNDP-GEF Kura II project will also construct a groundwater intake gallery to provide good quality source of water for the existing fish farm in the park. This fish farm will be restored and operated to produce fish fingers that will be released in the Oxbow lakes to restore the fish stock in these lakes.

The total cost of these interventions estimated to be 300,000 USD will be financed by the UNDP-GEF Kura II project. According to the international expert of the project, the implementation of these interventions will help restore and maintain the floodplain forest and improve the ecological conditions of the existing Oxbow lakes. The expert estimated the daily volume of water abstraction that will be pumped from the Kura river for these restoration interventions to be only 0.14% of the minimum daily flow of the Kura river, which will not have a negative impact on the river ecosystem or the water demands downstream the park.