Between the end of 2020 and the campaign for the second mandate at Palazzo Marino, in the autumn of 2021, Giuseppe Sala understood that green was no longer a marginal chapter of the program, but the perfect dress with which to re-present himself to the Milanese after Covid. Milan was emerging from the pandemic, climate sensitivity was growing, Greta Thunberg arrived at Youth4Climate right in the city accusing the leaders of only doing “blah blah blah”, and Beppe began to ride that wave promising a cooler, greener, more breathable metropolis. In the 2021 program he spoke of 3 million trees planted, 20 new parks and a real environmentalist turning point; a few months earlier, the Municipality had already adopted the Air and Climate Plan, around 600 pages of documents and attachments which on paper were supposed to change the metropolis, but which over time seemed much more useful for filling out objective sheets and management bonuses than for truly improving the air of the Milanese.
On paper, the Pac was impressive: 45% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030, carbon neutrality in 2050, return to limits on pollutants and containment of urban overheating with a cooler, more shaded and less waterproofed city. There are 50 official actions and they concern air, energy, mobility, climate adaptation and lifestyles. A true municipal green machine has consolidated around this promise: on a political level Elena Grandi, councilor for the environment and greenery; on a technical-administrative level, managers such as Angelo Pascale, director of the Green and Environment Directorate, and Paola Viganò, director of the Green Area. They, even more than the council, are the true executive pivots of the municipal supply chain which should have translated the ecological rhetoric into measurable results.
Yet, the most recent investigation into San Siro best shows how that green façade may have served to make choices of a very different nature presentable. In the investigators’ papers, in fact, the famous “carbon neutrality” of the club project appears as one of the open issues in the negotiation; in the chats attributed to the former councilor Giancarlo Tancredi and the general director Christian Malangone, even the use of carbon credits purchased abroad emerges, up to the reference to the precedent of Expo 2015 when trees were “planted” in Brazil. Translated: don’t really reduce the impact of a very heavy project here, but compensate for it on paper elsewhere. It is the point at which the façade green becomes almost didactic: an ecological paint useful for covering an operation which remains, in essence, strongly, indeed almost exclusively, real estate speculation.
The problem is that, almost ten years after the start of the Sala era, the real balance appears much less brilliant than the narrative. Let’s take ForestaMi, the flagship project: the official objective remains 3 million trees by 2030 in the metropolitan city, but the public count had reached just over 611 thousand plants including trees and shrubs at the beginning of 2024. It’s not zero, but not even the promised revolution. And above all he says one simple thing: to really reach 3 million within four years, the pace would have to accelerate greatly. ForestaMi exists, but up to now it has had an impact more as a great metropolitan story than as a complete transformation of the Milanese urban fabric. And here too the figure must be read carefully: we are talking about millions or hundreds of thousands of trees and shrubs, but often these are forest seedlings planted next to each other, already knowing that a very significant part will not survive.
The same goes for the greenery available to the Milanese. The new PGT sets the objective of 45 m2 of urban flora per inhabitant by 2030, but the latest municipal data, updated in 2026 based on Istat, says that the city is stuck at 18.8 m2, compared to 18.9 m2 the year before: it is not growing, it is decreasing. And there’s more. Behind ForestaMi’s story there is also the much less celebrated theme of the mortality of plantings: in 2023 it emerged that around 16 thousand plants had been lost, with drought indicated as a contributing cause and strong controversy over maintenance. It is a figure that has political weight, because it shows that it is not enough to plant trees: we must also keep them alive. And instead, here too, the council sold the announcement of its concrete holding much better.
To prevent young trees from dying in the increasingly hot summers, they must be irrigated. Yet, many systems in public gardens have been out of use for years or have never been repaired. New systems could have been created by exploiting first-aquifer water and using Pnrr funds or European resources for the ecological transition. Instead, nothing. And it is also from these simple, undone things that the distance between the proclaimed green and the practiced one is measured.
Also because Milan’s greenery does not grow in an abstract void: it grows, or should grow, within a city that continues to warm up. A 2025 dossier recalls that in Milan the heat island effect is “very sensitive”, with a difference of 4.2°C between the most urbanized areas and the vegetated ones; in the summer of 2024 there were 6 days of maximum heat risk level, 3 heat waves and 27 excess deaths among the over 65s in the month of August alone. The paradox is all here: while the Municipality speaks the language of climate adaptation, the real city continues to be a hot trap that is increasingly difficult to bear, especially in dense neighborhoods with little shade.
Not even the front of the trees allows for triumphalism. The storm of July 2023 knocked down almost 5 thousand specimens and showed how fragile the urban tree heritage was. And in the meantime, the city still lacks a real shrub registry, another issue that has been postponed for years and which will in all likelihood end up on the desks of the administration that comes out of the polls in 2027. On PM10 the picture is less apocalyptic but it does not absolve the city. Arpa Lombardia certifies that 2025 was a better year than 2024, with an overall improvement in air quality. But in Milan the Pascal and Marche control units still recorded 66 days over the daily limit, almost double the threshold of 35 exceedances. In a city that has made sustainability an identity mark, the fact that two stations remain so far from the target says much more than any slogan.
The most visible measures of the green turn were above all Area B and Area C. But even here the balance is less triumphal than the narrative: while the Municipality claims the decline in entrances and the most polluting vehicles, the fleet of vehicles in circulation has nevertheless grown to almost one million and the same documents recognize that Area B has had much more limited effects than Area C, with a reduction in access of just around 3%. Added to this is often insufficient data transparency, which makes it difficult to truly measure the impact of environmental policies.
The same goes for tactical urban planning. The Open Squares program has redesigned dozens of spaces, but over time it has become the symbol of another contradiction: areas conceived as an urban conquest, then contested for noise, degradation and difficulties for residents and shops. And, upon closer inspection, greens often only have the color of the asphalt: even depaving has resulted in more than one case of draining concrete, with high costs and modest results. Up to the paradox of Parco Sempione, where invasive works compromised the lawn while biodiversity was invoked.
And it is here that Sala’s greenery stops appearing unfinished and begins to look like a facade. In the many open investigations the lexicon of sustainability and regeneration often recurs as a cover for much more serious operations: the symbolic case is the “Hidden Garden” in Piazza Aspromonte. And in this very proceeding a judge has just admitted around forty Milanese residents and citizens as civil parties, also accepting a popular action to replace the Municipality, a person who was offended but never became a civil party.
The mechanism also returns in the other threads: via Stresa tells of a tower that was, according to the accusation, due for renovation; San Siro takes the same paradox to the extreme. The dossiers change, not the logic: an environmental veneer to make operations driven by other conveniences more presentable.
The final paradox is that this green slip into greenwashing was managed by a councilor, Elena Grandi, who comes from an environmentalist party. The fracture in that jagged world of Milan demonstrates this well: Carlo Monguzzi, historic environmentalist and among the last to continuously criticize the Sala council on this ground and on San Siro, who died prematurely a few days ago, had broken with Grandi over the lack of care for trees and similar. And even the way in which he was then put aside by the group leader tells of those tensions. The judgment on the mayor, therefore, becomes inevitable: rather than making sustainability a policy, he has made it a cover behind which Milan has continued to cement, heat up and suffocate.
