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Mountaineer and conservationist Alex Găvan, founder of the Green Belt Foundation, addressed the Climate Change Summit’s Green Stage on Wednesday, October 14.

He said during his intervention at the Restoring the Balance Sheet: Nature as Europe's Next Critical Infrastructure event that the proposed network should integrate forests, water, wetlands, grasslands, and farmland around and within cities, rather than operate as a conventional green belt primarily intended to limit construction.

"Bucharest and Romania need the right mechanisms to successfully face the challenges of the 21st century. Green belts are such a mechanism - and the Green Belt is meant to be the largest green infrastructure project in Romania,” he said.

“It should be planned, financed, and managed like other types of infrastructure, such as roads, utilities, and energy networks.”

The initiative has already secured protection from commercial logging for more than 26,000 hectares of forest in Ilfov County through Romania’s new Forestry Code.

The Green Belt Foundation is now in an ongoing process with the Environment Ministry "to accomplish through the implementing rules of the Forestry Code the protection from commercial logging" of several hundred thousand hectares of publicly owned forests surrounding Romanian cities. A proposed second stage would establish a national financing program that municipalities could voluntarily access to develop full green belts.

“We have also taken the project to Brussels, aiming to scale it up across the EU. Because protection without financing is a promise - and financing without protection is a subsidy that evaporates. Romania and Europe need both,” Alex Găvan stated.

He further argued that the economic value of standing forests is largely absent from public budgets, despite the services they provide.

“Over 70% of Europe’s economy depends on nature, yet we value it at zero. In public budgets, a road is counted as an investment. A forest is counted only as timber. The value of a standing forest - in terms of clean air, cooler summers, and flood protection - appears nowhere,” he said.

“And in the next EU budget, nature loses even its own dedicated line: it is merged into a single pot for climate and the environment, accounting for 35% of the budget.”

Further on, Alex Găvan also presented the Green Belt as an economic and public health investment, arguing that decision-makers are more likely to prioritize green infrastructure when its benefits are expressed in financial terms.

He said said air pollution costs Bucharest around EUR 6 billion a year, “the highest bill of any city in the European Union” - one paid through hospital admissions, lost working days, and lives. He also cited public data suggesting that residents could gain more than four years in life expectancy if authorities met their pollution-reduction targets.

In this context, Gǎvan described a green belt as “one of the cheapest utilities we can build to bring down that bill.”

According to him, green infrastructure should receive the same legal status, multiyear financing, and long-term planning as conventional infrastructure.

“Roads connect cities, but I truly believe that green belts keep them livable,” Alex Găvan concluded. “Planning one without the other isn’t infrastructure planning; it’s half a plan.”

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