Sofia Municipality is currently working on two ambitious initiatives concerning City trees.
In the current masterplan of the city there are areas that are dedicated for parks. However, most of these lands are privately owned and the expropriation will be a very expensive and long process for the Municipality.
For this reason, Sofia Municipality is looking for economic models and analyses to find solutions on how to realize these areas as parks.
The idea is to involve multiple stakeholders and assess not only the environmental aspects but also the financial ones thus creating a model that could be easily replicated to other areas in the same situation.
In 2017 Sofia Municipality has started the initiative the ‘New Forest’ of Sofia. The aim is to plant over 125,000 aromatic trees in the span of 5-6 years. The objective is to transform abandoned municipal land into an urban forest and to build a green belt near Sofia to help improve air quality.
The issue of air pollution in Sofia is a major problem. The Municipality is constantly seeking to find proper actions that are easy and not very expensive to implement to tackle air pollution from traffic and domestic heating, and thus an analysis on the ecosystem services (including value of trees, green roofs, heat islands) will be valuable tool to support policy making and planning.
Early adoption of the 100KTREEs toolbox in Sofia
100KTREES will develop a decision support tool to show how the placement of the trees can be optimised to yield the largest impact.
Several co-creation workshops will be organized in Sofia during 2023 and 2024 to lead to the development of a decision toolbox meeting the requirements of the Sofia municipality. Local associations and representatives of key stakeholders will be invited. Citizens will be also engaged through a crowd sourcing app collecting data on local trees.
The project is currently under development. Stay tuned for news and events on the implementation of the results of the 100KTREES project in Sofia by subscribing to our newsletter below.
