EY Romania

From 2055 back to today 4Futures offered a powerful shift in perspective.

By experiencing four possible futures, participants engaged with complex topics across climate, society and global systems, turning insight into reflection and dialogue.

🌐 The takeaway: long-term challenges require new ways of thinking about value and decision-making.

🌍 Thank you to all participants who joined, we hope this was a truly impactful and unique experience.

🤝 A special thank you to our EY teams, including the EY Climate Change and Sustainability team, Massimo Bettanin, Gaetano Casale and Ana Streche for their involvement in bringing this project to life.

Five themes from The Achilles' Heel of Defense, our BSDA 2026 side event with Aspen Institute Romania and OPIA Romania

Today’s closed-room conversation brought together public institutions, industry leaders, academia and allied partners around a single question: how does Romania convert the most ambitious defence investment cycle in its modern history into actual capability?

Five themes emerged.
➡️ Talent is the strategic bottleneck, not budget. The challenge is shared across NATO and Romania is well placed to lead on it, not lag.
➡️ Defence careers need to start being designed, not just advertised. Gap year programmes, university partnerships, transparent pathways and a serious role for reserves are all on the table.
➡️Romania's engineering and cybersecurity talent is already a strategic asset. The opportunity is to connect it to defence on terms that work for industry, government and the talent itself.
➡️Industrial collaboration and offset are know-how transfer mechanisms, if we choose to treat them that way.
➡️Cross-sector is not a slogan. It looks like the room we had today: MApN, MAE, the Ministry of Economy, the Defence Senate Committee, Romarm, Thales, the EIB and the Military Technical Academy in the same conversation.

Thank you to His Excellency Giles Portman, UK Ambassador to Romania, to our co-hosts, to every speaker and panelist, and to our colleagues from the UK who brought their experience into the room.

It was a pleasure reconnecting with our EY Alumni community and bringing together so many familiar faces for an evening of meaningful conversations.

Thank you to everyone who joined us, your presence is what made the event truly special. It was great to reconnect, exchange ideas, and celebrate the relationships that continue to grow beyond our time at EY.

Moments like these remind us that being part of EY is more than a chapter, it’s a lasting community. We look forward to continuing these conversations and creating more opportunities to stay connected.