Foreword

This report presents the main findings and conclusions from the project on “Promoting Green Growth and Low-Carbon Development: Analysis and Support to Policy Dialogue on Key Governance Elements of the Green Economy Concept in Moldova”, implemented as part of a collaboration between the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Republic of Moldova (henceforth, also referred to as Moldova) under the GREEN Action Task Force, for which the OECD provides a secretariat.

The main objective of the OECD-Moldova co-operation was to assist the partner country in establishing a greener development path, in particular by reducing the energy and carbon intensity of its economy. Its specific goal was to assist Moldova’s Ministry of Agriculture, Regional Development and Environment (previously, the Ministry of Environment) design a green public investment programme in line with good international practices, which estimates the overall costs compared with their environmental benefits but also identifies the financing sources.

This report outlines the results of a scoping exercise for creating an investment programme for reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the public transport sector in Moldova. Its aim is to demonstrate in practice how to use scarce public funds to encourage the private sector to invest in clean and socially important projects. The scoping study for the Clean Public Transport (CPT) Programme involved four main activity areas and outputs: 1) an initial scoping and analytical stage; 2) a costing methodology; 3) a programme design aligned with international good practice; and 4) an analytical report and training. This report summarises the results of a stepwise approach to the CPT Programme implementation by outlining two programme phases, two cities to participate in the first (pilot) phase and two scenarios for the second (scaling-up) phase.

The report relies not only on the extensive review of environmental legislation – reflecting standards in Moldova and the European Union – and technical regulations regarding public transport, but also on extensive collection of primary and secondary data on environment, transport and public services. The stocktaking analysis took into account the country’s national green growth and climate change commitments and budgetary requirements. The report also draws from several visits of the project team to Moldova in the period 2016-2018, during which they discussed various elements of the investment programme with a number of experts from government offices and local public administrations in Chisinau and Balti, as well as with experts from various international and non-government organisations active in the country.

This programme builds on previous work carried out by the OECD in the areas of public environmental expenditure management, integrating the environmental sector into medium-term budgetary processes and on climate change economics. More specifically, it uses a programme costing methodology (called OPTIC) that was developed by the OECD, with support by Germany, and tested previously in Kazakhstan. The methodology is focused on climate-related investment programmes.

The project in Moldova was supported financially by Germany’s Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU), through its 2014 International Climate Initiative (IKI). The project is part of a regional programme – Strengthening public finance capacity for green investments in the countries of Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia (EECCA) – that included two other country case studies: Kazakhstan (completed in 2017) and Kyrgyzstan (completed in 2019).

Foreword