Milan's Green Push Is Serious — But Paris and Amsterdam Are Still Lapping It

Milan recorded 47 days above 35°C in 2025, the highest count since regional environmental agency ARPA Lombardia began systematic tracking in 1990. That number is now shaping every major planning decision at Palazzo Marino, the city's historic seat of government, as officials race to green-proof a metropolis built largely for a cooler century.

The timing is pointed. With the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics opening in February, the city is under a global spotlight it hasn't experienced since Expo 2015. City hall under Mayor Beppe Sala has been pitching Milan as a model of urban climate adaptation — but environmental researchers and transport campaigners say the gap between the city's ambitions and its actual emissions trajectory remains uncomfortably wide.

What Milan Is Actually Doing

The most visible intervention is ForestaMI, the city's flagship urban forestry programme targeting three million new trees planted across the greater metropolitan area by 2030. By the end of June 2026, approximately 430,000 trees had been planted since the programme launched in 2019 — respectable progress, though well below the pace required to hit the final target. New canopy clusters have gone in along Viale Certosa in the northwest and in the Chiaravalle agricultural park south of the city, where the Comune di Milano partnered with the Fondazione di Comunità Milano last year to fund a 12-hectare rewilding corridor.

The Area C congestion charge, which costs drivers €7.50 per entry into the central zone, has been running since 2012 and remains one of the few hard economic levers the city consistently pulls on private car use. Traffic volumes inside the cordon fell roughly 30 percent in the first decade after its introduction, according to Agenzia Mobilità Ambiente e Territorio (AMAT). The city expanded the low-emission zone to include the semi-central Area B — covering roughly 72 square kilometres — in 2019, banning the most polluting diesel vehicles outright.

Porta Nuova, the gleaming district between Corso Como and Piazza Gae Aulenti, has become the de facto showcase for private-sector sustainability commitments: several towers there now carry LEED Platinum certification, and the Bosco Verticale residential complex continues to be cited in international architecture forums as a template for biophilic urban design. Whether that translates into city-wide carbon reductions, or merely expensive symbolism in one wealthy postcode, is a debate that has not been settled.

Where Milan Falls Short Against Its Peers

Compare Milan to Copenhagen, which committed €1.4 billion to climate adaptation infrastructure between 2011 and 2025, or to Amsterdam, where cycling accounts for roughly 32 percent of all daily trips inside the ring road. Milan's modal share for cycling sits around 6 percent, according to AMAT's 2024 mobility survey — an improvement on the 3 percent recorded in 2015, but hardly transformative for a city that has been adding kilometres of protected cycle lane each year along routes like Via Torino and the Navigli canal banks.

The tension with the centre-right Lombardy regional government under President Attilio Fontana complicates things further. Regional funding for public transit expansion has lagged behind municipal requests, and the long-delayed Metro Line 4 — the blue line connecting San Babila to Linate airport — only reached full operational service in late 2023, years behind its original schedule. Line 5 extensions that would reach more working-class northern districts remain stuck in funding negotiations.

With July already delivering record temperatures across northern Italy — Linate airport logged 37.8°C on July 2 — pressure is building on both the city and the region to accelerate the roll-out of emergency cooling centres. The Comune has designated 43 such centres across the city this summer, including spaces at the Palazzo delle Stelline in the Magenta neighbourhood and several civic libraries, open free of charge to residents without air conditioning.

Officials say a revised Climate Adaptation Plan is due for council approval before the Olympic opening ceremony in February. Whether the document will contain binding enforcement mechanisms, rather than aspirational targets, is the question that environmental groups including Legambiente Lombardia are pressing hard heading into autumn budget negotiations.