Algeria · Constructive Voices · Data Report

Algeria's Biodiversity and the Built Environment: ninety per cent of the people, twelve per cent of the country

Algeria is the largest country in Africa and one of the emptiest. Almost everyone lives on a thin northern strip that also holds almost everything alive outside the Sahara. That single fact explains more about Algerian biodiversity than any list of species does.

Constructive Voices · By Jackie De Burca · Updated August 2026 · Reading time approx. 18 minutes

Ask how urbanisation threatens Algerian biodiversity and the usual answer is green infrastructure — parks, green roofs, urban forests. That answer is not wrong, but it is aimed at the wrong scale.

The evidence points somewhere more specific. Roughly 90% of Algerians live on about 12% of the land, the fertile northern coastal belt. That belt holds the forests, the wetlands, the endemic plants and the last Barbary macaques. It is also where every housing programme, every tourism development and, since 2024, every new desalination plant is being built. Meanwhile Algeria's headline conservation figures are carried almost entirely by enormous Saharan sites, and marine protection stands at roughly 0.1% of territorial waters.

Algeria protects the empty places generously and the crowded ones barely at all. That is the built environment story here.

Algeria biodiversity and the built environment — Algeria's biodiversity and its building stock occupy the same narrow band of land. Image: Constructive Voices.

90 / 12Share of the population living on that share of the national land area

248Vascular plant taxa found only in Algeria

0.1%Of territorial waters under marine protection

43 of 57Algiers communes consuming land faster than their population grew

01 · THE GEOGRAPHYThe squeeze that explains the rest

Algeria covers roughly 238 million hectares. About 200 million of those are desert. The habitable, cultivable, biologically rich part of the country is a coastal and sub-coastal strip a few dozen kilometres deep, running between the Mediterranean and the Saharan Atlas.

Into that strip goes almost the entire population — around 48 million people in 2026, of whom about three-quarters live in urban areas. The urban share was 33% at independence in 1962 and 74% by 2021. In absolute terms, Algeria's urban population grew from under four million to over 33 million in six decades, and it is still growing.

Table 1 · Where Algeria's land is, and where its people are
Zone	Approx. area	Condition
Sahara	200m ha	Arid; under 200 mm rainfall a year
Steppe / high plateaux	20m ha	7m ha at acute desertification risk
Mountain zones	12m ha	Exposed to water erosion
Forest estate	~4.1m ha	About 2% of the national territory
Coastal and sub-coastal belt	~12% of land	Holds ~90% of the population

Sources: UNDP/GEF national reporting on Algerian ecosystems; Directorate-General for Forestry figures on the national forest estate; population-to-land distribution as used in Bounoua et al., Urban Science, 2023. Areas are approximate and boundaries between zones are not sharp.

Coastline length is given variously as around 1,200 km in older national reporting and up to 1,600 km in more recent summaries, depending on how indentations are measured. Either way, the ratio holds: a country the size of Western Europe, with a population squeezed onto a ribbon.

Algeria does not have a general urbanisation problem. It has a specific problem of putting all of its construction on top of all of its biodiversity.

02 · THE SPECIES RECORDWhat is actually endemic, and what is actually known

Algeria's flora is usually described as "over 4,000 plant species". The more precise and more useful figure comes from a 2023 taxonomic review: 248 vascular plant taxa are strict Algerian endemics, from 41 families and 128 genera, amounting to about 6.3% of the total known flora — which puts the total at roughly 3,900 taxa.

What that review found about the state of knowledge matters more than the headline count.

Table 2 · Algeria's endemic vascular flora
Measure	Finding
Strict Algerian endemic taxa	248
Families / genera represented	41 / 128
Share of total known Algerian flora	~6.3%
Range-restricted (one floristic region only)	59%
Assessed against IUCN criteria	16 taxa (6.4%)
Legally protected	44%
Falling within the protected area network	43%

Source: new analysis of the endemic vascular plants of Algeria, their diversity, distribution pattern and conservation status, Willdenowia 53, 2023. The northern mountain floristic regions hold the greatest concentration of endemics.

Fewer than one in fifteen of Algeria's endemic plants has ever been formally assessed for extinction risk. Nearly six in ten exist in a single floristic region, most of them in the northern mountains — the same mountains that burn, that are grazed, and that sit above the expanding coastal cities. A country cannot report against a target it has not measured, and Algeria has not measured most of what is uniquely its own.

The two flagship animals, accurately stated

Two large mammals dominate popular accounts of Algerian wildlife, and both are routinely described as Algerian endemics. Neither is. Both matter a great deal regardless, and their actual situations are more informative than the endemism claim.

Table 3 · Two flagship species, current status
Species	Status	Evidence base
Saharan cheetah Acinonyx jubatus hecki	Critically Endangered	Fewer than 250 mature individuals estimated across its entire range, which spans several Saharan and Sahelian states. Camera-trap work in the Ahaggar Cultural Park recorded densities of 0.21–0.55 per 1,000 km², among the lowest large-carnivore densities recorded anywhere in Africa, with average home ranges of about 1,583 km².
Barbary macaque Macaca sylvanus	Endangered	A 2025 review compiling published and unpublished Algerian data estimated more than 9,000 individuals, concentrated in Djurdjura, Gouraya and Chréa national parks, with new presence records in Skikda and Jijel. Shared with Morocco; not Algerian-endemic.

Sources: camera-trap survey and density estimation for the Saharan cheetah in Ahaggar Cultural Park, PLOS ONE, 2015, with ZSL/WCS/Panthera range estimates; conservation status review of the Barbary macaque in Algeria, 2025.

The macaque review is worth dwelling on, because its recommendations are built environment recommendations. Alongside habitat loss, overgrazing and the illegal pet trade, it identifies road traffic as a primary anthropogenic pressure, and among its priority actions are the installation of road signs and speed bumps on the routes through macaque habitat, and the creation of protected areas in the Guerrouche and Akfadou forests.

Signage and traffic calming are not usually filed under biodiversity policy. For Algeria's only primate, they are among the most direct interventions available, and they are entirely within the gift of highway authorities rather than conservation ministries.

Algerian ecosystems — Algeria's mountain forests hold the majority of its endemic plants and its entire macaque population. Image: Constructive Voices.

03 · THE PROTECTION MAPProtected where nobody lives

Algeria's conservation record looks strong at national scale and thin wherever you zoom in on people.

The country has 73 protected areas recorded in the World Database on Protected Areas as of August 2026, of which 16 have management effectiveness evaluations, plus five recorded "other effective area-based conservation measures" (OECMs). It has 50 Ramsar wetlands of international importance covering just under three million hectares, one of the largest such networks in Africa, drawn from a national inventory of more than 2,300 wetlands.

Table 4 · Area-based conservation in Algeria
Measure	Figure	Note
Protected areas (WDPA)	73	12 national designations; 16 with management effectiveness evaluations
OECMs recorded	5	Carry over 90% of coverage
Ramsar sites	50	2,991,013 ha
National wetland inventory	2,375	2,056 natural, 319 artificial
Marine protected area	233 km²	Of roughly 131,193 km² of marine area
Marine protection, share of territorial waters	~0.1%	Target is 30% by 2030

Sources: UNEP-WCMC, Protected Area Profile for Algeria, World Database on Protected Areas, August 2026; Ramsar Convention country data and Algerian Directorate-General for Forestry wetland inventory; World Bank development indicators on marine protected areas (2024); ProtectedSeas Navigator marine area data; global assessment of OECM contribution to GBF Target 3, Frontiers in Conservation Science, 2024.

Two things follow. First, a global assessment of OECMs found that in Algeria, as in Morocco, these measures now vastly exceed the coverage provided by protected areas and contribute over 90% of total area-based conservation coverage. Because Algeria's largest area-based sites are enormous Saharan cultural parks, the national coverage figure is dominated by desert. The number is real. It says very little about the coastal belt.

Second, marine protection at roughly one-tenth of one per cent is not a rounding error against the Kunming-Montreal target of 30% by 2030. It is effectively a standing start, at the exact moment when the coast is receiving the largest programme of new marine-adjacent infrastructure in Algerian history. Section 07 returns to that.

Commitments exist. Algeria has an NBSAP and a 2020–2030 integrated coastal zone management strategy, and national reporting to the Convention on Biological Diversity has described an ambition for a protected area network covering around half the national territory by 2030 — an ambition that, given the geography, would again mostly be desert. Two new protected areas were declared in 2019, Babor-Tababort National Park across Sétif, Jijel and Béjaïa, and the Cap Lindles nature reserve at Oran, and further parks at Taghit-Guir and Chelia-Ouled Yagoub have been proposed.

Algeria biodiversity — The Ramsar network is one of Africa's largest. Marine protection is close to nil. Image: Constructive Voices.

04 · LAND CONSUMPTIONWhat the commune-level data shows

"Urbanisation causes habitat loss" is true and useless. The question is whether Algerian cities are growing outward faster than the people in them, because that is the difference between densification and sprawl, and it is measurable.

A NASA-led study published in Urban Science in 2023 did exactly that, applying the UN's SDG 11.3.1 indicator — the ratio of land consumption rate to population growth rate — to every commune in five Algerian wilayas, using satellite-derived impervious surface data and the 2008 and 2018 censuses. A value above 1 means urban land is being consumed faster than the population is growing.

Table 5 · Land consumption against population growth, 2008–2018
Wilaya	Communes	On a sustainable path	Note
Algiers	57	14	Peripheral communes grew explosively; Rahmania's built-up area rose by up to 170%
Annaba	12	1	Population +20.5%, impervious surface +49.5% (+40.13 km²) across the decade
Tlemcen	53	32	Wilaya-level indicator 0.95, but 21 communes above the threshold
Oran	26	19	Six communes non-sustainable; Bir El Djir's population rose 137.5%
Ghardaïa	13	5	Built-up area rose 174% in El Mansoura and 250% in Hassi Lefhal

Source: Bounoua et al., "Sustainable Development in Algeria's Urban Areas: Population Growth and Land Consumption", Urban Science 7(1):29, 2023. Oran commune itself is excluded from the indicator because its recorded population fell owing to administrative redistricting. Counts of communes "on a sustainable path" are derived from the study's reported indicator distributions.

Three findings in that paper deserve to be carried into Algerian planning practice.

The indicator is non-linear, so wilaya-level reporting hides the problem. Tlemcen as a whole scores 0.95 and looks fine. Twenty-one of its communes do not. Any national statistic aggregated to province level will conceal precisely the sprawl it is meant to detect.

Sprawl is happening at the edges, not the centres. In Algiers, the dense historic communes — Casbah, Bab El Oued, Bologhine — grew their built-up area by under 10%. The peripheral communes where capital-city workers go looking for affordable housing grew by more than 100%: Souidania, Douéra, Ouled Fayet, Khraïssia, Mahelma, Rahmania. Land price is doing the land-use planning. The study notes a land-price-to-income ratio of about 24 in Algiers.

Some of the fastest proportional growth is in the desert. Ghardaïa, in the northern Sahara, showed built-up increases of 174% and 250% in two small communes. The M'Zab valley's traditional urban form — compact, oriented to sunlight, adapted over centuries to an arid environment — is not the thing that is expanding.

Longer-run coastal figures point the same way. On the north-central coast around Algiers, the urbanisation rate rose from 26% to 59.4% between 1962 and 1998, and researchers have projected that Algiers and Blida, currently 50 km apart, could form a single built-up area. The Mitidja plain, some of the most fertile agricultural land in North Africa, sits between them.

Urbanization and biodiversity in Algeria — Peripheral communes, not city centres, are where Algerian land consumption outruns population growth. Image: Constructive Voices.

05 · FIREThe northern forests, and a change of approach

The forest estate is about 4.1 million hectares, roughly 2% of the country, and almost all of it is in the north, interleaved with settlement. It burns.

Table 6 · Algeria's fire record
Measure	Figure
Forest fires recorded, 1985–2022	75,000+
Average area burned per year	~35,000 ha
Béjaïa province, 1985–2022	~5,300 fires / 144,000+ ha
2021 Kabylie fires — lives lost	90–100+
2021 damage to agriculture and housing	US$124m+
2023 fires — lives lost	34
2024 area burned (to November)	~8,100 ha

Sources: World Bank feature on Algerian forest fire management, June 2026 (which gives more than 100 lives lost in 2021); contemporaneous reporting and Algerian civil protection figures for the 2021 and 2023 seasons, which give 90 and 34 respectively; Statista compilation of area burned. Death tolls differ between sources and both ranges are shown.

The World Bank's 2026 assessment of the sector is unusually blunt about causes that are administrative rather than meteorological. Many forest management plans need updating, which limits the ability to reduce fire risk through active management. Boundary registration remains incomplete, leaving forests exposed to encroachment and competing land uses. Data systems are fragmented. Coordination across institutions is patchy.

Incomplete boundary registration is a built environment problem in the most literal sense: if the edge of the forest is not recorded, the edge of the town will decide where it is. The pilot programme now running in Béjaïa — the second most fire-affected province, and one where settlement and forest interlock closely — combines cameras, drones, access roads and water systems with institutional support, and an investment plan is being developed to scale early warning nationally.

Two legal instruments underpin the shift: the 2023 Forestry Law and the 2024 Law on Disaster Risk Management. Together they are intended to enable private investment and greater community participation in forest management. The 2024 season passed without loss of life in Tizi Ouzou for the first time in several years.

If the edge of the forest is not registered, the edge of the town decides where it is.

Algerian biodiversity threats — Fire, grazing pressure and land clearing compound each other in the northern forests. Image: Constructive Voices.

06 · THE STEPPEThe Green Dam, on its second attempt

Between the northern mountains and the Sahara lies 20 million hectares of steppe, about seven million of which are assessed as at acute risk of desertification. Algerian and international sources have reported natural steppe vegetation declining by around half since the late 1980s, driven principally by overgrazing.

The response is the Barrage Vert — the Green Dam — begun in 1971 as a belt of Aleppo pine roughly 1,500 km east to west and 20 km north to south, intended to hold back sand. It degraded. The current programme, relaunched in October 2023, is a different proposition.

Table 7 · Green Dam, 2023–2030 programme
Measure	Figure
Coverage target	3.7m → 4.7m ha
Provinces / municipalities covered	13 / 183
Afforestation target	400,000 ha by 2027
Budget, 2023–2030	DZD 75bn (~US$562m)
Reforested, 2023 to early 2025	~29,000 ha
Nurseries established	45
Seedling production capacity	120m

Sources: peer-reviewed analysis of the Green Dam relaunch with Djelfa as case study, 2025; comparative study of Algerian Green Dam execution, reporting 18,000 ha in 2023 and 11,000 ha in 2024; Algerian Press Service reporting on the programme; Executive Decree 24-376 of 18 November 2024 establishing the coordinating body. Delivery figures are as reported by Algerian authorities.

The design has changed in a way that matters ecologically. The first Green Dam was a monoculture barrier of non-fruiting conifers. The current version diversifies species, incorporates olive, almond and prickly pear, and adds agro-industrial and infrastructure components — in one Djelfa location, 100 hectares originally planned for atriplex forage were switched to prickly pear at local residents' request. It is being run as territorial development with a livelihood rationale rather than as a wall.

The honest caveat: at roughly 29,000 hectares delivered in the first two years against a 400,000-hectare target by 2027, the arithmetic does not currently work. Research in the Djelfa region also finds forest cover loss between 2015 and 2025 still exceeding reforestation rates. The programme is better designed than its predecessor and is running well behind its own schedule. Both statements are true.

Algeria biodiversity conservation — The steppe is the interface between the fertile north and the desert, and the least stable part of the country. Image: Constructive Voices.

07 · THE NEW COASTAL INFRASTRUCTUREDesalination, and what it discharges

Since 2024 Algeria has built the largest single programme of coastal infrastructure in its history, and it has done so on the same shoreline where marine protection stands at 0.1%.

Five mega-plants of 300,000 m³ per day each — Fouka 2 in Tipaza, Cap Djinet 2 in Boumerdès, and further plants at El Tarf, Oran and Béjaïa (Tigremt) — form the backbone. Fouka 2 alone supplies close to three million people across Algiers, Tipaza and Blida. A complementary programme of six further plants adding 1.8 million m³ per day is planned, designed to draw around 35% of operating energy from solar.

Table 8 · Algeria's desalination position
Measure	Figure
Large-scale seawater plants in operation	17
Combined capacity	~3.8m m³/day
Share of national drinking water supplied	~42%
New mega-plants, each	300,000 m³/day
Further programme planned	6 plants / 1.8m m³/day
Seabed salinity near the Beni Saf outfall	62.8 g/l
Salinity in unaffected areas	36.5 g/l
Specific national regulation of brine discharge	None identified

Sources: EcoMENA analysis of Algerian desalination capacity, February 2026; Algerian Energy Company presentation of the National Complementary Programme, NAPAC 2025; Belatoui et al. salinity measurements near the Beni Saf plant as reported in a 2024 review of desalination environmental impacts in Algeria; Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung North Africa reporting on the absence of specific brine discharge regulation.

The water security case is not in doubt. Algeria is among the countries most exposed to water stress globally, its aquifers are overexploited and its dams run critically low in drought years. Substituting desalinated seawater for groundwater abstraction genuinely relieves pressure on freshwater ecosystems, and can be argued as consistent with the Kunming-Montreal framework rather than against it.

The gap is on the discharge side. Measurements near the Beni Saf plant found seabed salinity of 62.8 g/l against 36.5 g/l in unaffected water — a difference far outside the tolerance of most benthic communities. Brine discharge also reduces dissolved oxygen and compounds existing pollution loads. Published recommendations are unremarkable engineering: site outfalls away from sensitive habitat, use diffusers to improve dispersion, and match discharge temperature to ambient. None of that is expensive relative to a 300,000 m³/day plant. What is missing is the requirement to do it.

There is an obvious sequencing point here. Marine spatial protection at 0.1% means there is no map of sensitive areas to site outfalls away from. The two problems are the same problem.

You cannot site an outfall away from a sensitive area you have not designated.

08 · GREEN INFRASTRUCTUREWhat four square metres buys

Green infrastructure in Algerian cities is a sound prescription. It is worth stating what the baseline it starts from actually is.

Table 9 · Urban green space in Algeria
Measure	2014	2021
Total urban green space	80m m²	174m m²
Per capita	2.06 m²	4.01 m²
Commonly cited international benchmark	9 m² per person

Source: Algerian Ministry of Environment figures as reported in a 2024 study of urban green space accessibility in Mostaganem. The 9 m² benchmark is widely attributed to the WHO but has no traceable primary WHO publication; it is included as the figure Algerian planning documents are measured against, not as a validated standard. Saïda has been measured at roughly 1.5 m² per person.

Provision roughly doubled in seven years, which is real progress from a very low base, and Law 07-06 of 13 May 2007 on the management, protection and development of green spaces gives it a legal footing. At 4 m² per person, Algeria remains far below the figure its own planning documents cite, and distribution within cities is uneven — the Mostaganem study found sharp disparities in accessibility between neighbourhoods, with some well-connected and others effectively cut off.

The land consumption evidence sharpens the point. In communes where population growth outran land growth, the result is overcrowding, which neither the SDG indicator nor per-capita impervious surface captures. In communes where land growth outran population, the study's own warning applies: the land available for parks, schools and green space gets consumed first, because housing is the most flexible category and it wins.

The Urban Science authors end on urban trees, noting that species choice and quantity strongly govern urban surface temperature and thermal comfort. In a country where Algiers, Oran and Annaba are all densifying under Mediterranean heat, tree canopy is a habitat measure and a heat measure at once. It is also the one green infrastructure intervention that can be delivered on existing streets without acquiring land.

Algeria biodiversity and green infrastructure — Street trees are the one green infrastructure measure that does not require acquiring land. Image: Constructive Voices.

What the evidence supports

Report land consumption at commune level, not wilaya level. Tlemcen looks sustainable in aggregate and has 21 communes that are not. Aggregation hides exactly what the indicator exists to find.
Complete forest boundary registration. The World Bank identifies it as a structural cause of fire vulnerability. It is a cadastral task, not an ecological one, and it is the precondition for defending forest edges against encroachment.
Designate marine protection before, not after, the outfalls are built. At 0.1% of territorial waters, there is no spatial basis on which to route brine away from sensitive habitat, and eleven more large plants are coming.
Regulate brine discharge explicitly. Diffusers, outfall siting and temperature matching are cheap against the cost of the plants. The measured 62.8 g/l at Beni Saf is what happens without the requirement.
Treat roads as macaque policy. Signage and traffic calming in Djurdjura, Gouraya and Chréa are highway-authority decisions with a direct effect on an Endangered species, alongside protection for the Guerrouche and Akfadou forests.
Assess the endemic flora. Only 16 of 248 Algerian endemic plant taxa have been evaluated against IUCN criteria. Nothing else in the northern belt can be prioritised properly until that number rises.
Plant street trees. At 4.01 m² of green space per person, canopy delivers habitat, shade and thermal comfort on land the state already owns.

09 · QUESTIONSFrequently asked

How does the built environment actually affect Algerian biodiversity?

Through geographic coincidence more than anything else. About 90% of Algerians live on roughly 12% of the land, and that same coastal and sub-coastal belt holds the forests, wetlands, endemic plants and remaining large mammals outside the Sahara. Construction, agriculture and biodiversity are competing for one narrow strip.

Which species are endemic to Algeria?

248 vascular plant taxa are strict Algerian endemics, from 41 families and 128 genera, most of them in the northern mountains. The Saharan cheetah and the Barbary macaque, commonly described as Algerian endemics, are not: the cheetah ranges across several Saharan and Sahelian states and the macaque is shared with Morocco. Both remain significant — the cheetah is Critically Endangered with fewer than 250 mature individuals across its whole range, and the macaque is Endangered with over 9,000 individuals recorded in Algeria.

How many plant species does Algeria have?

Roughly 3,900 known vascular taxa, of which 248 are found nowhere else. The often-quoted "over 4,000" is approximately right. The more important number is that only 16 of the 248 endemics have ever been assessed against IUCN criteria.

Is Algeria on track for the 30% protection target?

On land, the reported coverage is substantial but driven overwhelmingly by very large Saharan sites recorded as OECMs, which account for over 90% of Algeria's area-based conservation coverage. At sea, marine protected areas cover roughly 0.1% of territorial waters against a 30% target for 2030.

Are Algerian cities sprawling?

Unevenly, and mostly at the edges. Of 57 communes in the wilaya of Algiers, 14 showed land consumption growing more slowly than population between 2008 and 2018. Dense historic communes grew their footprint by under 10%; peripheral communes where workers seek affordable housing grew by more than 100%. In Annaba, 11 of 12 communes consumed land faster than their population grew.

What is the Green Dam and is it working?

A reforestation belt across the steppe, begun in 1971 and relaunched in 2023 with a DZD 75 billion budget to 2030. The redesign is a genuine improvement — diversified species, fruit trees, livelihood components rather than a conifer monoculture. Delivery is behind: around 29,000 hectares reforested by early 2025 against a target of 400,000 hectares by 2027.

Is desalination good or bad for Algerian biodiversity?

Both, depending on how it is regulated. Substituting seawater for groundwater relieves real pressure on overexploited aquifers and stressed freshwater ecosystems. But brine discharge raised seabed salinity near the Beni Saf plant to 62.8 g/l against 36.5 g/l in unaffected water, and no specific national regulation of brine discharge has been identified. With 17 plants operating and more planned, that gap is the deciding variable.

How much green space do Algerian cities have?

About 4.01 m² per person as of 2021, up from 2.06 m² in 2014 — roughly a doubling, from a very low base, against a commonly cited benchmark of 9 m². Provision is also unevenly distributed within cities.

What single intervention would help most?

There isn't one, but the cheapest with the clearest evidence behind it is completing forest boundary registration. The World Bank identifies it as a structural driver of fire vulnerability and encroachment, it is administrative rather than technical, and it makes every subsequent protection decision enforceable.

Methodology and sourcing

Land consumption figures come from Bounoua et al., "Sustainable Development in Algeria's Urban Areas: Population Growth and Land Consumption", Urban Science 7(1):29, 2023, which applies the UN SDG 11.3.1 indicator to every commune in five wilayas using Tsinghua University's global artificial impervious area dataset and the 2008 and 2018 national censuses. Commune counts described here as "on a sustainable path" are derived from the indicator distributions the study reports; the paper itself cautions that the indicator is non-linear and incomplete, and it does not capture overcrowding.

Endemic flora figures are from the 2023 Willdenowia analysis of Algeria's endemic vascular plants. Species status is from the published camera-trap and density work on the Saharan cheetah in Ahaggar Cultural Park and from the 2025 conservation status review of the Barbary macaque in Algeria.

Protected area counts are from the UNEP-WCMC World Database on Protected Areas profile for Algeria, August 2026; Ramsar figures from the Ramsar Convention and Algerian Directorate-General for Forestry reporting; marine protection percentage from World Bank development indicators. Fire figures are from the World Bank's June 2026 forest sector feature, supplemented by contemporaneous reporting for individual seasons; where death tolls differ between official and independent sources, both are given.

Green Dam delivery figures, desalination capacity figures and urban green space figures are as reported by Algerian authorities and state media, and have not been independently audited. They are presented as claims with their source identified rather than as verified statistics. Where a widely repeated benchmark has no traceable primary source — the 9 m² green space figure attributed to the WHO — that is stated at the point of use.

Nothing in this report constitutes planning, engineering or environmental compliance advice.

A Constructive Voices country data report by Jackie De Burca. Updated August 2026.

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Algeria Biodiversity and the Built Environment

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