Environmental science at CCMESI has been built project by project, in close dialogue with national and European research programmes and with local authorities and practitioners. Each completed study left something behind: a method adopted by other teams, a dataset used by the next generation of research, a peer-reviewed paper, or a report that shaped practice in Romanian cities and regions.
Our completed projects fall into a few connected strands. Environmental quality in residential and metropolitan areas was the earliest line of work, running through the 2000s with integrated assessments of Bucharest’s metropolitan area, the Arges lower basin, and wider Romania (ECOLOC, ECOSED, BIOXEN, CNCSIS IDEI, CEEX TERITRANS, CEEX EVA, MEQUEP). Urban green infrastructure and green space planning grew from those foundations into a sustained programme on the availability, accessibility, and equity of urban green spaces, including SmallGreen, PlanGreen, GreenEquity, CoPLAN, and Naturb. Nature-based solutions emerged as a strand of its own through HealthyNature and complementary work on urban food and landscapes in FoodPLand. Environmental conflicts and governance were examined in NatConflict (conflicts in Natura 2000), CONURB (conurbation dynamics), and CoEIA (collaborative environmental impact assessment), producing a body of work on how communities, authorities, and ecosystems negotiate shared space. Urban lakes and blue infrastructure were addressed by Emersa, which evaluated the ecosystem services of Bucharest’s lakes under climate change. Climate, landscape and land use underpinned all of these, with MACCNET on climate adaptation, UCLIMESA on urban heat islands, and Bioregio Carpathians on cross-border landscape classification in the Iron Gates region.
Taken together, these projects trained a generation of researchers, produced a large body of peer-reviewed publications, and laid the groundwork for the team’s current focus on inclusive nature-based solutions, citizen science in urban planning, and climate-resilient metropolitan regions.
Browse the full list below, or return to Environmental science for the team’s current work.