Loss of Land to Development Places Malta Among Top 5 in Europe

While Valletta stands as one of Malta’s most celebrated historical landmarks, an area of green space larger than the UNESCO capital has been lost to construction since 2018.

A new investigation by Amphora Media, in collaboration with Arena for Journalism in Europe and supported by The Malta Environment Foundation, reveals how nearly 830,000 square metres of nature and cropland have been built up in Malta between 2018 and 2023.

That’s about 116 football pitches – or two Manoel Islands – and roughly a quarter of Comino. It’s almost double the entire land area of Vatican City.

The investigation uses methodology established in ‘Green to Grey’, an award-winning investigation into documented green land (nature and cropland) loss in Europe. It was coordinated by Arena for Journalism in Europe and initiated by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) to quantify for the first time exactly how much nature is being lost to construction in Europe. 41 journalists from 11 countries worked together with scientists from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA) to refine their novel methodology. Malta was excluded… until now.

Explore the map

Malta’s total land loss stands at 0.26%, placing it above the UK and among the top 5 countries by share of green area lost to development. The figure is a conservative estimate as the data uses an AI model to flag potential ‘Green to Grey’ areas.

The largest five areas identified in the research in Malta ranged from over 20,000 to over 34,000 square metres.

The land use changes may seem small on a map and are dispersed across Malta and Gozo. But as Peter Verburg, a professor of environmental spatial analysis at VU University Amsterdam, explained, the cumulative impact is driving global change.

According to figures provided by the European Environment Agency, Malta lost 920,000 square metres of land to development between 2012 and 2018; between 2006 and 2012, Malta lost 190,000 square metres.

Taken together, the data show that since 2006, when the PN government introduced its rationalisation exercise, Malta has lost at least 1.94 square kilometres of green land.

Artificial surfaces are the largest land use category in Malta, followed by cropland, which constitutes another quarter, and shrubland, about one fifth of the land area.

Statistically, around 26% of the Maltese islands’ area is covered by artificial surfaces, and almost 15% is built up as of 2022. 

Source: Eurostat

For comparison, areas enjoying some form of protection under the Natura 2000 framework cover nearly 14% of Malta’s land. Compared to other EU countries, Malta has a low rate of artificial area per resident, meaning that many people are concentrated in relatively small built-up areas.

In the Green to Grey team’s analysis, the Netherlands led in the share of land taken up by construction between 2018 and 2023, with 0.46%. Belgium, Poland, and the UK followed, with 0.25% or more. Countries of the Scandinavian peninsula lost 0.06% or less.

How did we do it?

With guidance from Arena for Journalism in Europe and Green to Grey’s coordinators, Amphora Media replicated the project’s methodology. This consisted of:

1. Using Dynamic World, a land use and land cover dataset produced by Google and the World Resources Institute, employing a deep learning model;
2. Tuning the algorithm to isolate every pixel that changed from not being built-up to being built-up between 2018 and 2023;
3. Manually verifying the model’s output;
4. Calculating the land take-up;
5. Finding case studies.

The team did not manually examine the entire territory of Malta to see whether the algorithm missed any developments, so the calculations and the map of identified land use change are conservative estimates, and some developments may be missing.

This method used satellite images only and did not address whether the land taken up is outside the development zone.

How to use the map

The map outlines the areas that were developed (turned from green to grey) and were detected as such by the algorithm. By scrolling through the map, you can zoom in, select a site, and see how it changed from a satellite view.

The Amphora Media team verified the shapes on the map using satellite imagery. Inaccuracies may occur where satellite images were unclear. The algorithm may have missed some developments because it relied only on satellite imagery. Therefore, use the map as a starting point for further inquiry rather than as conclusive evidence.

This investigation was supported by The Malta Environment Foundation