Tirana's Orbital Forest — A 2-Million-Tree Urban Greenbelt Behind Its 2030 Target

Tirana's 2030 masterplan, developed with Stefano Boeri Architetti, proposed an "orbital forest" of two million trees encircling the city to check urban sprawl, alongside green and blue corridors along the Lana and Tirana rivers for flood resilience and "pocket forests" in built-up areas to improve air quality.

Delivery has lagged the ambition. Investigating municipal figures, the independent Albanian fact-checking outlet Faktoje.al found the Parks and Recreation Agency (APR) had planted about 58,000 trees and shrubs over roughly four years — an early rate near 1,208 plantings per month that slowed to about 157 per month — putting the programme on a trajectory of roughly two centuries to reach the two-million-tree goal rather than the 2030 deadline. An earlier 2018 target of 100,000 trees planted by World Forest Day was also not met on schedule.

The case is included as an honest example of a well-publicised nature-based masterplan whose ecosystem-service claims (carbon, flood buffering, air quality) remain largely unverified against actual planting and monitoring data.

Read the full analysis: https://en.faktoje.al/why-planting-of-two-million-trees-promise-in-tirana-by-2030-is-a-lie/