More than Leisure: The Fight to Re-Green Bucharest   

Bucharest is home to one of the largest protected urban natural areas in Europe: Văcăresti Natural Park, spanning more than 186 hectares. Interestingly, the wetland, hosting hundreds of unique species of flora and fauna, is more the result of accident rather than design. Romanian civil society has played a crucial role in preserving Văcăresti, and efforts are now underway to develop a network of rewilded urban green spaces in and around Bucharest.  

Romania’s capital offers its inhabitants a dire lack of green space – less than 10 square metres per capita, far below the 26 square metres required by the EU or the 50 recommended by the WHO. By comparison, Ljubljana, often cited as Europe’s greenest capital, provides over 540 square metres of green space per inhabitant.  

Yet Bucharest is home to one of the most remarkable urban natural ecosystems in Europe. The Văcăresti delta started out as a half-built, man-made reservoir during Romania’s communist era, but it was abandoned after the change of regime in 1989 and left in prolonged administrative limbo. Over the next few decades, wildlife reconquered the park without human intervention.  

The feral, accidental type of nature that thrived on the site is deeply tied to how Bucharest evolved as a city: Like many post-communist capitals, it has seen three and a half decades of rapid and chaotic land development. The transition to market-based land ownership outpaced coherent urban planning, leading to profit-driven growth in which land was treated primarily as a commodity. While this scenario is not unique to Bucharest, its effects here are particularly acute, resulting both in severe ecological deficits and unexpected potential.  

A success story 

Romanian authorities delayed completing or repurposing the Văcăresti reservoir for more than two decades, which allowed the ecosystem to develop spontaneously. When biologists began documenting the area’s flora and fauna in 2011, the park had earned a bad reputation shaped by years of neglect, frequent garbage dumping, and rumours about its supposed danger.  

Paulina Anastasiu, director of the Botanical Gardens of Bucharest, recalls that even researchers were initially hesitant to enter the area: “I didn’t even dare to visit the place because there were urban legends saying that the place is full of feral dog packs, that a military unit from the area was using the ground for exercises. With my team made up entirely of women, we didn’t dare go there. But one day we decided to go, and, to my surprise, we didn’t encounter any danger, so we started returning regularly to study the flora.” What Anastasiu’s team found was a highly biodiverse ecosystem, including two plant species listed as endangered in Romania.  

With more than 330 plant and 94 bird species initially identified in the area, Văcăresti became an active battleground between economic and environmental interests. “We worked to convince the authorities that it’s important to have a place like this in a big city,” recalls Cristian Neagoe, communications and community manager at Bucharest Natural Park, an NGO focused on rewilding the metropolitan area. “They kept saying that development is the number one priority in Bucharest. There were, of course, various real estate projects targeting that area.” 

For the NGO, a major priority was reconnecting people living in the vicinity with the place itself, remedying decades of disconnect following the demolition of the neighbourhood located in the Văcăresti area during the communist era to make space for the reservoir. Academics and civil society groups worked together for several years to document species, conduct an environmental assessment, lead volunteer garbage clean-up campaigns, create visitor infrastructure, and advocate for protection. Their efforts proved successful in both directions: the communities near the delta reclaimed it as part of their neighbourhood, the authorities recognised the value the area was bringing to the city, and, in 2016, Văcărești officially became an urban natural park. The site’s ecological value has continued to unfold over time, with ongoing monitoring documenting 180 bird species – more than a third of Romania’s total. Over time, Văcărești has become a leisure, research, and environmental education hotspot.  

“Annually, between 50,000 and 75,000 children visit the park,” said Mircea Calnegru, director of the park’s administration, at a recent event that celebrated a decade of protection for Văcărești. At the same time, he called for further development of the park’s infrastructure to enhance climate resilience and meet educational and research needs around its ecosystems.  

In Bucharest, places like Văcărești are increasingly understood through the lens of what academic literature describes as informal urban wild spaces, socio-ecological entities “with a history of strong anthropogenic disturbance that is covered at least partly with non-remnant, spontaneous vegetation”. Recognising the potential of these pockets of green space as key elements in rethinking urban nature and people-nature relationships in sustainable ways has led conservationists to adopt rewilding strategies. This approach aims to minimise and curate the impact of the anthropic factor in support of restoring natural processes and species, thus enabling landscapes to recover their ecological integrity and resilience. This strategy also increasingly aligns with European environmental policy priorities on biodiversity, climate adaptation, and sustainable urban development. 

The feral, accidental type of nature that thrived on the site is deeply tied to how Bucharest evolved as a city: Like many post-communist capitals, it has seen three and a half decades of rapid and chaotic land development.

The Bucharest Natural Park team draws inspiration for its projects from Berlin, another European city shaped by decades of division. The German capital is also the birthplace of the Bauhaus movement, whose ideas underpin the New European Bauhaus, one of the EU’s policy and funding initiatives for green, sustainable development in built environments. During a field visit to Berlin, researchers from the Romanian NGO observed how strong law enforcement, adequate funding, and cooperation between authorities and civil society can transform urban ecology. At the same time, the comparison highlighted Bucharest’s remarkable biodiversity: “We were surprised by the lack of insects, and therefore of birds. There is little biodiversity in Berlin, which shows it’s very difficult to rewild areas that have been heavily industrialised – like railway infrastructure. Even if these areas are currently protected, they don’t have the biodiversity we still see in Bucharest,” Neagoe explained. This insight reinforced two priorities: stronger institutional commitment to enforcement and funding, and broader public education about the ecological value of Bucharest’s feral nature.  

Scaling up rewilding  

Transversal cooperation has played an important role in protecting the Văcărești Nature Park, but the fight to protect Romania’s ecosystems is far from over. “The most difficult thing after having a success story is to see how to grow, how to scale it so that it becomes a network of stories, at the city level,” said environment minister Diana Buzoianu at an event in May 2026 marking the 10th anniversary of Văcărești gaining protected status. To further support the park’s ecosystem, its administrators, along with city authorities and civil society, are implementing a transnational project that will integrate rainwater collected from neighbouring areas in the wetland water system. This effort aims to enhance both the ecosystem’s resistance to drought and the neighbourhood’s resilience to flooding. Through the same project, the park will be connected with other green-blue areas of Bucharest.  

Building on the Văcărești experience, the team at Bucharest Natural Park identified five more neglected areas - Băneasa forest, Petricani Meadow, Dâmbovița Floodplain, Saulei Valley, and the Dobroești Reedbeds – totalling more than 1300 hectares. In 2024, the NGO launched the Bucharest Rewilding programme to develop a network of rewilded urban green spaces, with the aim of improving the wellbeing of the human and non-human inhabitants of the city and its climate resilience. 

On 30 July 2025, Petricani Meadow became the first of these sites to gain protected status. Despite its modest size of just 5.6 hectares, the area hosts hundreds of plant, insect, fish, bird, and mammal species, including 44 protected ones. The nature park is accessible to the general public even as conservation and monitoring efforts are underway alongside volunteer-based environmental education. Dan Bărbulescu, director of the Bucharest Natural Park NGO, says this approach is needed for the project’s continued success: “Conservation and monitoring of natural spaces should go hand in hand with public visitation, for awareness raising, so people can understand why these areas should be preserved and what their contribution to a better quality of life is.”  

Lasting threats 

Yet challenges remain. In Bucharest, the value of green spaces is still largely assessed in terms of their leisure function and surface area. Bărbulescu warns that this approach overlooks their role in climate adaptation, biodiversity support, and long-term urban resilience. 

The Băneasa Forest illustrates these tensions. Covering roughly 1,100 hectares on Bucharest’s northern edge, it has been one of the city’s most accessible escapes into wild nature for generations of Bucharest residents. More than a century of logging, habitat fragmentation, and encroaching transport infrastructure and real estate development led to drastic ecosystem degradation. 

A tiny remnant of ancient forests that spread centuries ago from the Subcarpathian Hills all the way to the Danube and once a thriving ecosystem, Băneasa has seen a massive loss in biodiversity. Dan Turiga, a forester and activist with Agent Green, a Romanian environmental conservation NGO, describes it as a forest that has lost its apex predators: “This is a forest in which red deer used to live. They need a large circulation area and a quiet habitat. We still have roe deer, they are smaller and more adaptive, but they also became inbred because of the isolation of the forest from other bodies of forest.”  

Recounting memories of his grandmother, who used to hear wolves howling nearby the village she grew up in, located at the edge of a forest not far from Băneasa, Turiga adds: “These forests, Băneasa included, used to be a habitat for wolves, badgers,” explained Turiga, recounting memories of his grandmother who, approximately 80 years ago, used to hear wolves howling nearby the village she grew up in, at the edge of a forest not far from Băneasa. 

The forest’s presence in Bucharest’s collective memory has helped sustain public attachment, but in the absence of coherent policy, efforts to safeguard Băneasa have largely translated into repeated cycles of civic pressure rather than stable protection. One such wave of pressure led to a partial victory in 2020, when the forest was reclassified by the Romanian Forestry Authority as a park forest, essentially stopping industrial lumber exploitation and only allowing less invasive silvicultural treatments, like dead wood removal. “I think it’s a small step forward. Not sufficient, though, because the forest is still exploited for wood, at the edge of legality,” explained Turiga. He also believes that a long-term ecological vision for the preservation of Băneasa is absent, which poses a constant threat to the forest’s ecosystem.  

Bucharest demonstrates both the risks of fragmented governance and the latent potential embedded in spontaneous ecosystems.

Last year, the fragility of this protection became evident with the reemergence of an old conflict: a forest road illegally built and later opened by the local forestry authority for public car traffic. The road was officially justified as infrastructure serving forest exploitation, but in practice it provided a shortcut for residents of a nearby residential compound that cut directly through the forest. Over the years, pressure from real estate developers on local authorities had proved strong enough to keep the road open for months in a row several times, until public pressure and law enforcement managed to get it closed. The latest toll contract that opened the forest road to vehicles started in September 2025.  

According to Turiga, the ecological impact of opening the road for vehicles was immediate and severe. Daily car traffic disrupted animal movement, trapped emissions within the forest canopy, and generated high levels of dust from the gravel surface, affecting both wildlife and people using the forest for recreation. More fundamentally, he argues, the road should not exist at all as it was partially built after industrial logging stopped, and thus its legal justification has been flawed from the beginning.  

The debate around the road has also revealed deeper governance failures. “When it comes to managing the Băneasa Forest, it’s essential that managers, forestry personnel in general, regain a high degree of professional conscientiousness and ethics, which lately has been questionable,” argued Turiga, referencing the caving in of forestry authorities to the pressures of real estate developers.  

An analysis from the Ministry of Environment’s Control Body, released in February, concluded that the section of the road built after 2020 – and the toll contract enabling public access – were illegal. The report concluded that the road should be returned to its original state. Subsequently, the Romanian Forestry Authority banned vehicle access to the road in April.  

Yet even as these governance failures persist, the process of formal protection has begun to take shape, under continued public pressure. In September 2025, environment minister Diana Buzoianu announced plans to designate Băneasa Forest as a protected area, framing it as a vital green asset of the capital. Civil society once again proved an important actor in this process. Since the beginning of 2025, biologists from the Bucharest Natural Park Association have conducted a scientific study that could serve as a basis for efforts to grant the forest protected status. Biologists identified 207 animal species living in the forest, out of which 45 are protected, as well as 80 plant species. The study, officially filed for evaluation with the Romanian Academy in March 2026, signalled a transition from advocacy to institutional procedure, but the outcome remains uncertain.  

According to Buzoianu, the project is part of a broader policy initiative aiming to extend stronger protection regimes to peri-urban forests across Romania. “This project will show that we can have a common mission – civil society, the ministry, local mayors – all these actors must work together,” the minister stated. Yet, as the unresolved road dispute illustrates, the translation of such commitments into enforcement remains uncertain. 

Why rewilding matters 

Băneasa Forest is part of a broader ecological system that enhances Bucharest’s capacity to cope with climate stress. When announcing plans for its protection, Buzoianu warned that “If we don’t protect the Băneasa Forest, Bucharest will become a microwave oven.” The metaphor may be blunt, but it captures measurable reality: in a city increasingly exposed to heatwaves, large forested areas function as temperature and humidity regulators.  

Together with Văcăresti delta, Petricani Meadow and other wild ecosystems, Băneasa forms a fragmented but functional network of green-blue spaces with systemic effects. Various connected green spaces allow species to circulate through the hostile urban environment, expanding biodiversity beyond the limits of any single site. In this sense, rewilded areas extend far beyond their recreational value, operating instead as distributed environmental infrastructure.  

Above all, these areas serve as protection for those who are most vulnerable to environmental stress. They matter most for the elderly and children during heatwaves, people with chronic illnesses, and those living in poor housing conditions. Moreover, the mental health benefits of easy access to wild ecosystems carry particular weight for those who lack economic or logistical possibilities of accessing wilderness outside the city: low-income families, people with disabilities, caregivers or new parents navigating restricted mobility. Rewilded areas offer psychological relief without the commercial component often associated with traditional parks or natural spaces located far from the city.  

While large ecosystems such as Băneasa or Văcărești operate at a metropolitan scale, rewilding in Bucharest is also unfolding in smaller, more distributed forms. Children’s Forest Association, an environmental NGO focused on urban reforestation across southern Romania, is developing microreforestation projects across overlooked urban plots, transforming them into dense, biodiverse patches that concentrate ecological functions within limited space. “I see two main benefits,” explains Teodora Pălărie, president of the association. “On one hand, microclimatic regulation, and on the other, biodiversity. These are pockets of biodiversity – we even call them pocket forests. Think of a pocket dictionary that you carry with you: small enough to fit in your hand, but holding an entire language inside.”  

By planting between 25 and 30 native species typical of southern Romania, these sites compress ecological diversity into highly visible, educational environments. This density not only strengthens ecological resilience but also shapes perception: “When you see so many different species per square metre, you become curious – you start noticing differences between a linden, a birch or a poplar tree; you want to find out more about that little forest surrounding you,” she noted. 

These micro-forests function as tangible climate infrastructure. Pălărie added that research and field observations suggest that once such a patch extends over roughly three hectares, it can influence the surrounding neighbourhood, lowering summer temperatures by 2 to 5 degrees Celsius while moderating winter extremes. Just as importantly, they reduce the amplitude between day and night temperatures, a factor linked to soil degradation and desertification. “I often tell people who take part in our planting events to imagine the forest like the hair on a camel,” Pălărie explained. “It protects against strong solar radiation and reduces day-night temperature differences, helping soil maintain structure.” Even at smaller scales, these interventions act as local refuges: shading streets, buffering wind, increasing air humidity through evapotranspiration, and creating pockets of cooler air that can be directly experienced during heatwaves.  

In Bucharest, there is a strong and growing public demand for direct engagement with such spaces. Approximately 240 volunteers participated in a recent planting event, out of which 140 were children. As a scout leader said while coordinating his team, “Planting events don’t happen that often, maybe two or three times each spring. They’re rare, and there’s huge demand. All the centres in Bucharest want to come, so as soon as we hear about one, everyone rushes to sign up.” The enthusiasm reflects the perceived value of such hands-on environmental experiences as educational and community-building tools.  

The vision of the “Cool Bucharest” project, which is currently being developed by Children’s Forest Association, is to locate many of these micro-forests in accessible spaces – museum gardens, social service centres, and courtyards – where entry would be free and unrestricted. If funding is secured, these sites could function as everyday climate shelters. “Once you bring nature into the city, through Miyawaki miniature forests for example, or through rain gardens or urban meadows, you create a network,” Pălărie argues. “The power of that network is much more achievable than the possibility of having a single 50-hectare park in Bucharest. Nobody will offer such a large space.”  

Together, large protected ecosystems and micro-forests distributed in between begin to outline a different model of urban green infrastructure: one that is layered, connected, and designed around ecological function rather than surface appearance.  

From an administrative point of view, rewilding can also be economically beneficial. “Using native plant species is financially efficient – they are adapted to our local climate and, if they are also perennial, it means we don’t have to make yearly financial efforts to keep some areas green,” explained Anastasiu of the Romanian botanical garden.

Bucharest’s shades of green  

Ecologists argue not for replacing classical parks, but for diversifying the urban green-blue infrastructure. Both designed parks and wild urban areas offer access to nature and climate resilience, but they do so in various proportions and through different means. Structured parks tend to prioritise accessibility, aesthetics, and spaces for outdoor play and sports, while rewilded areas allow ecological processes to unfold more freely, strengthening biodiversity and climate adaptation capacity. “Well-managed parks alternating with wild spaces is the way to greatly increase the green-blue areas in Bucharest. That’s what we are working for in the Colentina Lakes area, by maintaining Saulei Valley and Dobroesti Reeds as wild areas to alternate with the classical park restoration that is projected to take place there,” explains Bărbulescu of Bucharest Natural Park Association, referencing other areas targeted for protection by the Rewilding Bucharest program. 

From the accidental emergence of Văcărești Natural Park to the contested protection of Băneasa Forest, Bucharest demonstrates both the risks of fragmented governance and the latent potential embedded in spontaneous ecosystems. Hosting almost 10 per cent of Romania’s population, the city would greatly benefit from integrating rewilding into urban master plans, climate adaptation strategies, and budgetary frameworks. Shifting responsibility from civic activists to public authorities and ensuring protection and legal enforcement for rewilded areas are key steps to take in that direction.   

The broader European context reflects the need for this shift. Nearly three-quarters of EU citizens currently live in urban areas, a figure projected to rise to almost 80 per cent by 2050. This demographic makes urban resilience one of the defining political and ecological questions of the coming decades. Bucharest’s trajectory suggests that sustainable cities will not be those that control nature most tightly, but those that learn to embed ecological complexity into urban planning.