The Romanian Country Initiative debuted its activity with the organisation of a workshop on March 24^th at the Chamber of Commerce in Bucharest, gathering around one table key stakeholder groups such as governmental authorities (the Ministry for Regional Development and Tourism responsible for buildings policy, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Environment), municipalities (e.g. City of Bucharest), the construction industry, associations for housing, employer associations, local banks and European financial institutions managing European funding (EIB and EBRD).

The roundtable combined presentations (about EU policy, local policy implementation in Romania, best practices such as the Czech Green Investment Scheme (based on the selling of AAUs under the Kyoto Protocol), available EU funding opportunities, ESCOs and technical solutions) and discussion sessions. During the debate, roundtable participants defined current barriers and discussed vividly how to concretely overcome those and how to stimulate a more active uptake of energy efficiency investments by the Romanian market.

Key objectives of the workshop:

• Create a platform for knowledge sharing and debate (focus: how to make large scale retrofit happen on national level by improving access to finance sources);
• Review (untapped) funding opportunities on national level and demonstrate how to get access them;
• Showcase best practices on the use of structural funds (from other countries);
• Define barriers and debate how to concretely overcome them to stimulate a more active uptake by the markets;
• Identify priorities and action points on Member State level (e.g. transposition of EU directives in national legislation, market stimulation, effective policy implementation).

Please find the presentations below.