As 2025 draws to a close, it is time to reflect on Vilnius’s role as European Green Capital 2025. With the baton soon passing to Guimarães for 2026, the city can now pull together the threads of an intense year built on decades of work to make Vilnius “the greenest city in the making”.
A Covenant signatory since 2012, the Lithuanian capital has been working hard to become climate-neutral by 2050. Thanks to an ambitious Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP), Vilnius adopted an integrated approach to fulfil its climate targets while placing its citizens at the heart of policy.
Vilnius is active in many areas to make the city—already one of the greenest in Europe, according to the Husqvarna Index HUGSI, which classifies 61 % of its territory as green (forests, parks, grass meadows)—even greener. From improving public transport and upgrading cycling infrastructure to planting more trees and creating community gardens and decarbonising its heating system, the city has been fully committed to its decarbonisation agenda.
Making the City even more green, thanks to citizens
To expand green spaces, Vilnius set an ambitious 2017 target: 100,000 new trees, 1 million bushes, plus a further 300,000 “winders” to green schoolyard fences and create hedges. Eight years later, 94 % of this target had been spectacularly achieved.
The city did not act alone. Citizens were central, as highlighted in the Cities Refresh Campaign article and the Citizen Diaries that the Green Capital programme hosted in 2025.
Laura Petruškė, EU Climate Pact Ambassador, co-founder of Ideas Garden (Idėjų Lysvė) and grassroots organiser, explained in the Citizen Diary how engaged citizens are the lifeblood of a healthy city. By involving the local community in several activities, Laura helped create a community garden that is open to everyone—from families to the elderly to young people—and has become a hub of aggregation, relaxation and inspiration, “a place for people to experiment”.
Beyond these neighbourhood-scale activities, the City of Vilnius also organised several collective tree-planting events that helped reach the overall target. For example, in spring 2025 over 600 hundred citizens planted a 10 hectare forest park on a former parking lot.
As Rugilė Matusevičiūtė, sustainability advocate and EU Climate Pact Ambassador in Lithuania, explains, these initiatives—alongside various public events and educational efforts—are shaping Vilnius into a greener, more sustainable city.
These greening efforts are underpinned by data analytics that identify the highest concentrations of heat, air and noise pollution. Using this data, a detailed map was produced, measuring and monitoring specific city zones where heat islands form, thereby allowing Vilnius to pinpoint strategic priority areas for greening.
District Heating: the backbone of Vilnius' decarbonisation efforts
Apart from urban mobility measures and heat island mitigation, Vilnius has also worked hard on decarbonising its heating. These substantial efforts are beginning to show tangible results, improving air quality and saving money.
In 2025, Vilnius’s district heating system serves over 7,200 buildings through a 760 kilometre network, delivering approximately 2.8 TWh of heat annually, making it one of the largest networks in the Baltic region.
This impressive capacity stems from strategic investments made over the past years. The most significant, as reported in the City Heat Detox Campaign article, was the creation in 2013 of a Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant with a thermal capacity of 164 MW and an electrical capacity of 70 MW.
Combined with the most powerful absorption heat pump in the Baltic region (9 MW), Vilnius’s district heating now runs largely on waste heat and biogas, saving millions in heating costs and reducing carbon emissions.
Pipeline upgrades also represent a major achievement. Although a third of the network remained obsolete in 2025, considerable progress has been made: over the past 15 years, several kilometres of pipelines were replaced with pre-insulated ones, improving efficiency and halving heat loss—from 24 % to 12 %—thereby positioning Vilnius’s district heating as one of the most advanced in Europe.
Always looking forward
While 2025 is ending, Vilnius’s efforts are far from finished. Plans to increase green coverage, enhance urban mobility, and raise the share of biogas in district heating keep the city on track to meet its 2030 and 2050 climate targets.
Vilnius demonstrates how a well-designed SECAP combined with political will can drive a social and ecological transition that keeps citizens at the heart of policy. By merging data, design, nature-based solutions and citizen engagement, the city sets an example of how the energy transition can work at the local level, ensuring social inclusion while markedly improving climate resilience.
As Vilnius proves that a city can grow greener while keeping its heart warm, and Guimaraes is up to follow, it is time for another city to take the baton and light the way forward: the applications for the European Green Capital Award 2028 are now open, do not miss this opportunity!
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- Publication date
- 11 December 2025