Urban Micro-Lungs — Miyawaki Method Mini-Forests in East Amman

Amman's East district is densely populated, low-income and short on green space in an arid climate. The Improving Living Conditions in disadvantaged Areas (ILCA) project, funded by Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) through the implementing agency GIZ (€5m, later topped up by €3m more), partnered with Jordan's Ministry of Environment and the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) to respond.

Under the resulting ‘Urban Micro-Lungs’ initiative, the team adapted the Miyawaki method — dense, multi-layered native planting that grows roughly ten times faster than conventional plantations — for the first time to a Middle Eastern dryland city. Around 40 native species were collected as seed stock; public sites used 18 of them, including mastic, evergreen oak and strawberry tree, planted about three seedlings per square metre with engineered soil. Forests need irrigation for two to three years before becoming self-sustaining.

Three sites have been planted since a November 2018 private-garden pilot, followed by two public-park forests in November 2020, the largest measuring 250m². The project produced a plant-species selection guidebook for GAM to scale the approach city-wide. Reported outcomes so far are mostly at output level — sites built, funding spent, guidebook published — plus anecdotal sightings of new birds and insects by the gardeners; no quantified biodiversity, carbon or temperature monitoring for the Amman sites has been published.

Read the full analysis: https://aiph.org/green-city-case-studies/amman-jordan/