The allocation of public funds to urban tree planting in Italy has become a more visible budget line since 2020, when a combination of EU climate resilience funding, the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), and renewed public attention to urban heat islands pushed municipal administrations to formalise commitments that had previously remained vague. The figures now available from Rome, Milan, and Brescia allow a partial comparison — though consistent accounting methods across cities do not yet exist.
Rome: Over €7 Million for 5,800 Trees in One Season
Roma Capitale announced its 2024–25 street tree planting season in November 2024, publishing both a tree count target and a budget figure — a level of transparency not standard in previous years. The declared budget exceeded €7 million, drawing from three separate funding streams: jubilee funds tied to the 2025 Catholic Jubilee urban improvement programme, departmental funds from the Dipartimento Tutela Ambientale, and national ministerial grants.
The 5,800 new trees were distributed across all 15 municipal districts (Municipi I–XV), with documented interventions including 95 Cercis siliquastrum specimens on Via Cola di Rienzo, 28 field maples (Acer campestre) on Via Crescenzio, and additional plantings in public parks and peripheral green corridors. The planting season ran from November 2024 to 30 March 2025, following the standard Italian practice of confining bare-root installations to the dormant period.
Rome has also committed to 26,000 tree pruning operations in the first quarter of 2025, recorded through its Greenspaces monitoring platform. Maintenance expenditure of this scale — not reported in previous annual public summaries — suggests the city is attempting to improve the survival rate of existing stock rather than relying solely on new plantings to meet canopy coverage targets.
Milan Metropolitan Area: PNRR Funding for 63,000 Plants
The Città Metropolitana di Milano announced in late 2024 the deployment of approximately 63,000 trees and shrubs across two distinct PNRR-funded projects. The plantings target 62.51 hectares spread across 19 municipalities within the metropolitan area, at a density of 1,000 plants per hectare. The metropolitan authority has taken on responsibility for five years of follow-up maintenance, watering, and replacement — a commitment that represents a departure from past practice in which municipalities often accepted plantings without guaranteed aftercare funding.
The Forestami project, running in parallel under a different funding arrangement, set an initial target of 3 million trees for the metropolitan territory by 2030. As of the 2023 progress update, roughly 400,000 trees had been planted or formally committed to planting agreements with municipalities and private landowners, placing the project on a trajectory that would require acceleration to meet the decade-end target.
Funding Sources and Accounting Challenges
The PNRR's Mission 2 (Green Revolution and Ecological Transition) includes a specific component for urban greening — Mission 2, Component 4, Investment 3.1 — which allocated €330 million nationally for urban forestry and green infrastructure. Individual city allocations are determined by population and urban density, with Milan and Rome receiving proportionally larger shares.
A persistent accounting difficulty is that municipal reporting conflates trees planted in streets, parks, and peri-urban green corridors into a single count, making it difficult to isolate street-specific planting expenditure. The per-tree cost implied by Rome's declared figures (roughly €1,200 per tree including installation and three years of aftercare) is consistent with benchmarks cited in Italian forestry literature, but the same cost is not published for the PNRR-funded Milan projects.
Brescia: Annual Tree Balance Sheet
Brescia has published a formal Bilancio Arboreo (tree balance sheet) annually since 2021 — a document that records plantings against removals and reports the net change in the municipal tree heritage. The 2024 edition covered the period from March 2023 to April 2024 and recorded 1,168 new plantings against 585 removals, a net gain of 583 trees.
The city's current tree heritage includes 19,478 trees managed along streets and avenues, 42,333 in public parks, and approximately 100,000 in municipal woodland areas. The ratio of street to park trees (roughly 1:2.2) reflects the relative difficulty of expanding canopy in dense historic street grids, where underground utilities and building proximity constrain root development and crown clearance.
Brescia's balance sheet approach — reporting removals alongside plantings — offers a more complete picture than Rome or Milan's communications, which typically report gross planting figures without disclosing how many trees were simultaneously removed. Tree removals due to disease, structural failure, or construction work regularly offset gross planting figures by 20–40% in Italian urban inventories, according to a 2024 estimate published in the Italian Journal of Agronomy.
What the Targets Do Not Capture
Municipal canopy targets in Italy are typically framed as tree-count goals rather than canopy-coverage percentages. Rome has not published a specific percentage target for street canopy; Milan's Forestami goal of raising coverage from 16% to 21% is a metropolitan-territory figure that includes peri-urban forests and agricultural fringe areas rather than urban streetscapes specifically.
The European Urban Nature-Based Solutions Network has noted that Italian cities generally lag behind northern European peers in adopting percentage-based canopy targets and integrating tree canopy requirements into building permit conditions. Several Italian municipalities have introduced green ratio requirements for new development since 2022, but enforcement and monitoring capacity remain inconsistent.