The Republic of Moldova aims to enhance its resilience in the face of increasingly frequent extreme weather events associated with climate change, such as floods, which result in loss of life and property damage. To this end, the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) is providing around €4 million to build national hydrometeorological monitoring and early warning systems and to apply an integrated water resources management approach to five river basins.
The project funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), titled ‘Rehabilitation of water infrastructure to mitigate vulnerability to extreme events caused by climate change in the Republic of Moldova’, will be implemented by the end of 2027.
“Climate change is expected to increase the occurrence of intense rainfall in Moldova, with potentially damaging flooding consequences, given the country’s hilly terrain and current land use patterns. The new project we are launching today will put in place knowledge, capacity, infrastructure, policy and regulatory frameworks that will contribute to long-term impact by strengthening the country’s capacity to manage extreme rainfall and climate-driven events to prevent flooding,” head of the Austrian Development Agency Office in Chisinau.
We are pleased to start a new project with Austria to improve disaster risk management, building on the success of a previous initiative that supported the creation of rainwater harvesting ponds as an effective climate change adaptation measure. Another result has been the establishment of volunteer community fire stations that have reduced response times for firefighting interventions. These posts serve 65 communities with a population of over 60,000 people. In the future, we will contribute to flood risk mitigation for at least 65,000 people in areas that are directly exposed to flood hazards,” said Daniela Gasparikova, UNDP Resident Representative in the Republic of Moldova.
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The project “Rehabilitation of hydrological infrastructure to mitigate vulnerability to extreme events caused by climate change in the Republic of Moldova” is a continuation of an innovative initiative previously implemented by UNDP with financial assistance from the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and Estonia. The initiative focused, on the one hand, on the creation of more community volunteer fire stations in the country’s most vulnerable districts with a high fire risk and, on the other hand, on the construction of rainwater collection basins.