In a scathing attack on the Tehran Municipality, head of the health, environment and urban services commission of the Tehran City Council lambasted the TM’s inability and seemingly unwillingness to preserve and protect the city’s green areas.
At a council meeting on Tuesday, Rahmatollah Hafezi used visual aids to show the declining trend of Tehran’s green spaces over the past several years. In the rare castigation of the inefficient and struggling organization, the councilor said, “The municipality cannot be trusted to save the trees and gardens. The time has come for the city council to take it upon itself to preserve what is left,” the Persian-language news website Khabaronline reported.
He pointed to recent reports about tree felling in the central Sattarkhan neighborhood in the capital and said satellite images show that the huge district has lost a major part of its vegetation in the past 11 years. “It is impossible to have clean air when the basic infrastructure (trees and green areas) is being wiped out.”
Pointing to the TM’s much-publicized “Blue Sky, Clean Earth” environmental campaign, Hafezi said the campaign slogan will never come to fruition if current trends persist.
“Unless council members step up and save the city’s greenery, it will soon be consigned to history,” he warned.
