On 16 December, the city of Iasi in Romania launched the development of a Green City Action Plan (GCAP) with the aim of fostering the city’s climate action. Mihai Chirica, Mayor of Iasi, stressed in his opening remarks some of the city’s infrastructure challenges and emphasised Iasi’s aspirational green growth and low-carbon development agenda.

Venera Vlad, Associate Director of the Sustainable Infrastructure Group at EBRD, highlighted the important role cities can play in fighting climate change. The GCAP and EBRD Green Cities programme will support Iasi in delivering a systematic green economy transition.

The official GCAP launch event was followed by a well-attended workshop with local stakeholders. The aim of the workshop was to better understand and to get a comprehensive view of the environmental challenges the city of Iasi is facing. In small group discussions, stakeholders from civil society, academia and the private sector provided feedback on questions like “How bicycle friendly is Iasi?” or “How safe do you feel in the city?”.

The Mayor of Iasi acknowledged the feedback received and emphasised the importance of the participatory approach for development of the GCAP. He encouraged all stakeholders to play an active part in the GCAP process to define tailored environmental priorities, objectives and actions. The stakeholder event was the first in a series of four consultations that will take place in the course of the GCAP development.

The city of Iasi is one of three Romanian cities that are part of the EBRD Green Cities network, alongside Craiova and Medias. For Iasi, an EBRD loan of EUR 20.5 million has been provided to improve the energy efficiency of 15 buildings as well as bus and tram depots. This project serves as a “trigger” project for the city’s GCAP.

The Iasi GCAP is generously financed by the TaiwanBusiness – EBRD Technical Cooperation Fund.