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Good practice Imported

Tirana's 'Orbital Forest' — A Contested Two-Million-Tree Municipal Pledge

Albania · Tirana · See the Albania profile · See the Tirana profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 100% 7/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Tirana's mayor claims the municipal 'Orbital Forest' pledge (2M trees by 2030) reached its one-millionth tree in 2023, but Albania's High State Control audit and a 2023 investigative-journalism cross-check of Parks Agency data found low realisation, no dedicated budget, and a cum

2,000,000
Target trees to be planted by 2030
~14,000 ha
Green space area targeted
1,000,000
Trees claimed planted (municipal announcement, 2023) (2023)
50,000 trees/year
Self-reported average annual planting rate
~58,000
Independently verified cumulative trees planted (APR data) (2019-2023)
~1,208 trees/month
Independently verified average monthly planting rate

Details

Promoter
Municipality of Tirana — Parks and Recreation Agency (APR); reviewed by Kontrolli i Lartë i Shtetit (Albania's High State Control)
Period
2016–2030 (ongoing, contested)
Keywords
urban forestry, municipal governance, public accountability

Context

As part of the 'Tirana 2030' master plan developed with architect Stefano Boeri, Mayor Erion Veliaj's administration committed to an 'Orbital Forest': a ring of parks, forests and managed farmland around Tirana intended to plant 2 million trees by 2030 and connect roughly 14,000 hectares of green space. In March 2023 the mayor held a public ceremony announcing the 'one-millionth tree', presented as halfway to the 2030 target, with the city separately reporting an average planting rate of 50,000 trees a year.

Results

Albania's High State Control (the country's supreme audit institution) reviewed the project in 2022 and found 'a very low level of realisation', attributing it to financial impossibility and lack of available planting space; it also found no dedicated municipal budget line for the Orbital Forest and questioned whether the widely cited '1 million trees' figure even belonged to this project. A 2023 investigation by Citizens.al and Politiko.al, cross-referencing municipal Parks and Recreation Agency (APR) data, found APR had planted a cumulative total of roughly 58,000 trees over four years (about 1,208 a month) — nearly two orders of magnitude below the pace implied by the '1 million trees' claim.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Long (> 3 years)
Staffing & skills
Municipality of Tirana — Parks and Recreation Agency (APR), oversight by Kontrolli i Lartë i Shtetit (Albania's High State Control)

Conditions for success

  • a dedicated municipal budget line for the programme
  • sufficient available planting space
  • independent verification of planting figures using disaggregated agency data

Common failure modes

  • no dedicated budget line found by the national audit institution
  • very low realisation rate attributed to financial impossibility and lack of planting space
  • headline planting figures not corroborated by agency data

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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