Photo Credit: Shana Edberg/Hispanic Access Foundation
Have you felt that life seems to make more sense when you’re out in nature? In the concrete and the polluted air of built-up neighborhoods, we feel a turmoil and pull from our obligations that melts away under the shade of trees and the clean air of the mountainside. Natural areas are a respite from our everyday lives, and increased usage of our national parks and public lands and waters during the pandemic has confirmed how badly we need it.
But nature is more than a respite for the mind, body and soul in times of stress. It is a respite from the dangers of the climate crisis, a carbon sink, and a source of clean air, water, and soil that we rely on for our basic needs. It is also a provider of local jobs and revenue and a boon to children’s education.
Unfortunately, not everyone is able to access and unlock these benefits. Nationally, communities of color are three times more likely to live somewhere that’s “nature deprived.” A nature-deprived neighborhood is one that is facing a greater rate of destruction of close-to-home natural areas and green spaces than average, be it from urban sprawl, gray infrastructure, or oil and gas development. With communities of color also more likely to be over-burdened by sources of pollution, this is a double whammy of environmental injustice.
Protecting natural areas and restoring degraded areas that are close to urban areas and communities of color is a way to help mitigate this injustice. One such example of a beautiful protected area is the San Gabriel Mountains, at the northern edge of the Los Angeles Basin, where I grew up. Los Angeles County is a large urbanized area encompassing multiple cities and millions of residents, many of whom are underserved and live in nature-deprived neighborhoods.
Photo Credit: Shana Edberg/Hispanic Access Foundation
More than 15 million people live within 90 minutes of the San Gabriel Mountains, and the mountains provide 70 percent of Los Angeles’ green space – alleviating the Nature Gap. The mountains also provide a third of LA County’s drinking water. President Obama designated the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument in 2014, protecting LA’s water quality, improving air quality, and providing better access to outdoor recreation for millions of Angelenos while protecting the area’s ecosystems and wildlife.
The Angeles National Forest, which encompasses the Monument, is also a key player in the Earth’s climate system. The range’s trees and chaparral absorb carbon dioxide from the air and together store 11.6 Million Metric Tons of carbon, equivalent to the emissions from 2.5 million cars for a year.
Hispanic Access Foundation works with community leaders and policymakers throughout California and the US to bring the benefits of nature to Latino communities. From the absorption of pollutants to resilience to extreme heat, droughts, and storms to the physical and mental health benefits of being outdoors, our communities need access to nature more than ever in an increasingly chaotic and warming world.
Decision-makers in Congress, the Biden administration, and the State of California are currently considering policy that would protect more nature in California. One such example is the PUBLIC Lands Act, introduced by Senators Alex Padilla and Dianne Feinstein, which would protect and increase access to more than one million acres of public lands and over 500 miles of rivers in California, including the San Gabriel Mountains. Another policy example is Governor Newsom’s Executive Order to protect 30% of California’s lands, water, and ocean by 2030 (known as 30×30), a goal that is also reflected nationally in the Biden Administration’s America the Beautiful initiative.
These nature protection and restoration policies must be implemented equitably, centering the needs and voices of communities of color, in order to guarantee a safe, inclusive, pollution-free outdoors for all that addresses environmental justice, meets community needs, and confronts the urgency of the climate crisis we face.
Watch this video to learn more about the importance of protecting public lands, such as California’s San Gabriel Mountains for conservation.
Shanna Edberg is the Director of Conservation Programs at Hispanic Access Foundation.
When many of us think of conservation and Natural Climate Solutions, cities may not be the first places that come to mind. We might imagine vast spaces like national parks, forest preserves, or coastal ecosystems. But conservation is not only the preservation of wilderness – it can also integrate into urban areas through city parks and thoughtful planning of the entire urban landscape. For some communities where green spaces are common, this comes as no surprise. But many neighborhoods, particularly communities of color, lack the benefits of a nearby greenspace. People of color are three times as likely to live somewhere that is nature-deprived than predominantly white communities. This “nature gap” leads to disproportionate health and economic impacts due to poor air quality, urban heat islands, limited exercise and recreation opportunities, and greater risks from severe weather.
Cities around the United States are addressing this equity issue by listening at the local level, and the Trust for Public Land is helping communities plan for urban green spaces that provide numerous social, environmental, and climate benefits. One such example of urban conservation has taken place in the middle of west Atlanta’s historic Vine City neighborhood. The area has long been home to African American luminaries like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It sits adjacent to the nation’s oldest and largest association of historically Black colleges. It’s also been a “center of gravity for activism and leadership during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s,” and has been a “home for generations of Black scholars, business owners, and activists.”
The neighborhood is also in a lower-lying area where Proctor Creek once flowed before it was channelized and buried in the early 1900s. As development expanded, naturally absorbent lands were replaced with pavement and other impervious surfaces that send stormwater into an already stretched stormwater system. All of these factors combined to put the neighborhood at increased risk for flooding during storms. In September 2002, days of heavy rainfall overwhelmed the sewer system and flooded hundreds of homes, many of which became uninhabitable. The cost of rebuilding the homes – and risks of a repeat flooding incident – were deemed too great, and city leaders decided to relocate residents and raze more than 60 properties.
Photo Credit: Alex Jackson/The Trust for Public Land
The Trust for Public Land partnered with the City of Atlanta, the local community, and a network of generous donors, innovative consultants, and experienced contractors to create a space that will make the site and the surrounding community more resilient as storm events continue to become more significant and frequent. This was accomplished by creating a dynamic park that has the ability to collect and manage 9 million gallons of stormwater from the 160 acres adjacent to the site using innovative green infrastructure solutions. Without the park and its specialized green infrastructure, flooding would have continued to wreak havoc on this neighborhood.
This summer, the neighborhood completed this transformation from tragedy to triumph, as Vine City celebrated the opening of Cook Park. It is now a “gleaming new space of trees sprouting and gardens of native grasses and plants filling in their beds. Walking paths wind past new playground and exercise equipment centering a two-acre pond ringed with wildlife-friendly wetlands.”
As with any successful conservation initiative, this project relied on partnerships and community engagement. The opportunity to work with Vine City and English Avenue residents, helping address these topics through the creation of a best-in-class park is a perfect example of how the process can be as important as the outcome. Through community festivals, neighborhood association and church gatherings and formal presentations, residents became vital partners to The Trust for Public Land and the City of Atlanta as we strived together to create a space that, in addition to reducing the risk of dangerous flooding, inspires physical activity, calms nerves and draws people together.
Photo courtesy of HDR 2021 Paul Dingman
We are excited that the design, planning, and construction of the park positioned it well to become a center-point for outcome-based, health-focused recreation services and planned fitness programming when it finally opened. Over the project’s six-year lifespan so far, we have partnered with a number of small, neighborhood-based or neighborhood-focused organizations to provide health-centric programming. Urban Perform, the Arthur M. Blank YMCA, and Chris 180, to name a few, are poised to use climbing boulders, sport courts, and fitness equipment as soon as social distancing restrictions are lifted. The relationships we have formed with neighborhood groups and individual residents have allowed a more efficient and inclusive transition from design to construction to stewardship.
Lastly, while not the primary goal, the park can also help mitigate climate change by planting trees. Research by University College London has shown that urban forests can store nearly as much carbon per hectare as tropical rainforests. In the U.S., the top 100 largest U.S. cities alone contain approximately 2 million acres of city park space; collectively these conservation efforts add up to make a big difference. And with Cook Park, Atlanta is one step closer to its goal of putting a great park within a 10-minute walk of every resident.
For more information on Cook Park and the Trust for Public Land:
Many rural counties in the United States face the dual challenges of lagging economic growth and increasingly severe effects of climate change. While urban areas are not uniformly prosperous and rural areas are not uniformly poor, rural communities on average lag behind their urban counterparts on most key economic indicators — from poverty rates to labor force participation. Rural areas represent 86% of persistent poverty counties in the U.S., while over 50% of rural Black residents live in economically distressed counties.
These challenges have been intensified by economic losses from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated existing inequalities and highlighted urgent infrastructure needs. At the same time, catastrophic wildfires, record heatwaves, drought and other severe weather events linked to climate change threaten rural communities and livelihoods.
Addressing both the climate crisis and lagging economic vitality will require federal investment in building a new climate economy for rural America — one that reduces greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero while creating jobs, uplifting economically disadvantaged communities, and enhancing ecosystem services. This opportunity is already being realized in targeted regions (clean energy is a growing economic engine for many rural communities) and federal policymakers now have the opportunity to dramatically expand on this progress.
New WRI analysis finds that an annual federal investment of nearly $15 billion in key areas of the rural new climate economy would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in rural communities, add billions of dollars of value to rural economies, and generate millions in new tax revenues. This investment would help combat the economic stagnation confronting many rural areas and ensure that the benefits of the transition to a net-zero economy are widely distributed.
Understanding Rural Economic Opportunity by Area and Geography
In this new paper, we analyzed the impact of $55 billion per year in federal investment in seven areas of the new climate economy over at least five years. These include investments in renewable energy; energy efficiency; transmission, distribution, and storage (TDS); environmental remediation of abandoned fossil fuel infrastructure; tree restoration on federal and non-federal lands; and wildfire risk management. An estimated $14.9 billion of that investment (27%) would be directed to rural America.
That investment would support nearly 260,000 direct, indirect and induced jobs for at least five years in rural counties (a total of 1.3 million job-years) and 740,000 jobs for five years in the country as a whole (a total of 3.7 million job-years). This equates to 17.5 jobs per $1 million invested in rural counties.
The results also indicate that new climate economy federal investment in rural areas would offer an attractive return on investment by adding $21.7 billion per year to rural economies for the first five years — $1.46 for every dollar invested. This includes $12.9 billion in employee compensation and $1.6 billion in federal, state and local tax revenues. The figure below shows the distribution of economic benefits across the seven investment areas.
Rural Economic Impacts by Investment Area (each year for first five years)
* Results in the table are for rural counties only. For the purposes of this analysis, we use Rural-Urban Continuum Codes developed by the USDA Economic Research Service to delineate rural areas. This geographic-economic classification scheme distinguishes between two broad types of regions: metropolitan counties (codes 1-3) and non-metropolitan counties (codes 4-9). This analysis considers all non-metropolitan counties to be rural. Source: The Economic Benefits of New Climate Economy in Rural America, 2021
Job creation benefits would be widely dispersed across the country’s rural areas and vary by sector depending on regional economic factors. The top five states seeing the most significant impacts in terms of job creation relative to the size of local rural economies would be California, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Wyoming and Nevada.
California, New Mexico and Nevada would benefit most substantially from wildfire risk management investment. Massachusetts and Nevada, by contrast, would benefit largely from investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and grid transmission and distribution.
The analysis shows the geographic distribution of rural job creation potential (measured as jobs created in a rural county per 1,000 private sector workers, aggregated at the state level) from federal investment in each of the seven areas analyzed. Different investment areas naturally impact regions differently depending on local economic factors and where opportunities are located.
For instance, Massachusetts, California, Nevada, Maryland and Illinois would see the most job creation benefits from federal investments in renewable energy, while rural counties in Pennsylvania, Kansas, West Virginia, Kentucky and Wyoming would benefit most from investments in environmental remediation of orphaned oil and gas wells and abandoned coal mines. The latter is particularly important given that these are the same regions that have seen significant job losses due to the phasing out of coal generation. Investment in these regions can therefore help ensure a more just economic transition.
Rural counties in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho and New Mexico are expected to see the highest levels of job creation from investment in tree restoration on federal lands, while those in Missouri, Ohio, South Dakota, Michigan and Wisconsin would benefit most from investment in tree restoration, including agroforestry, on state, local and private lands.
Direct and Indirect Benefits of Rural Investment in the New Climate Economy
Federal investments in the rural new climate economy would also provide benefits beyond job creation. Wind energy can help farmers and landowners earn money, providing additional income support and enhancing financial stability during lean times. Energy efficiency projects can help reduce energy bills for rural households by as much as 25%, representing more than $400 in annual household savings.
Investments in wildfire risk mitigation can help reduce the danger that catastrophic wildfires pose to rural communities and forests — an important point given that western wildfires are becoming more frequent and more destructive. In 2018 alone, wildfires in California cost the U.S. economy 0.7% of the nation’s annual GDP, highlighting the need to invest in measures that can help mitigate fire risks.
Local tax payments generated from these projects also provide much-needed revenue to rural communities for investing in new and improved infrastructure including roads, bridges and schools. In some cases, when a renewable energy project comes to a rural area, it is the largest single taxpayer in the county and accounts for a large share of the county’s budget.
Potential Impact on Economically Disadvantaged Rural Communities
To enable a new climate economy that supports economic wellbeing in all communities, federal investment in the seven areas described above must support the nation’s most economically disadvantaged rural communities.
The new climate economy opportunities described previously could create more than 118,000 jobs for at least five years (a total of 590,000 job-years) in these counties, resulting in over $9.8 billion added to these rural economies annually, including $5.9 billion in employee compensation and $685 million in total taxes.
Economically disadvantaged rural counties in California, Texas, New Mexico, Missouri and Kentucky stand to benefit the most in terms of total jobs supported by federal investment in the seven focus areas of this analysis.
Federal Investment in the New Climate Economy Could Significantly Benefit Economically Disadvantaged Rural Counties
While this job creation is significant, representing approximately 45% of job creation potential from investment in the seven areas of the new climate economy, more needs to be done to ensure economic benefits reach the areas where they are most needed.
Actions on this front could include: workforce training programs in the energy and land sectors with employment guarantees; measures to make clean energy affordable for low-income households; grant programs to support local businesses and nonprofit organizations; and requirements that new program designs be collaborative, inclusive and accessible to all workers.
Federal Policies Can Support a Rural New Climate Economy
The federal government has an opportunity to enact and expand policies that will drive investments in the new climate economy, creating jobs and bolstering rural economies in the process. Fully activating the opportunities analyzed in each of the seven areas would require a suite of federal policies, which could support a larger federal plan for rebuilding infrastructure and mitigating climate change.
The current push by Congress and the Biden administration to invest in the country’s ailing infrastructure and tackle the climate crisis represents the most promising political moment in years to support a new climate economy in rural America.
The proposed American Jobs Plan, representing the administration’s basis for negotiations with Congress on infrastructure, would provide historic levels of federal funding for places that have faced declining economic opportunities.
Several policy provisions of the American Jobs Plan — including investments in transmission lines, rural electric cooperatives to advance low-cost clean energy in rural communities, plugging orphan wells and cleaning up abandoned coal mines, and forest restoration — have the potential to create jobs and spur broad-based economic growth
The investments considered in our analysis, however, will likely not be sufficient on their own to recruit and train the workforce necessary to implement new climate economy pathways.
The policies recommended here will also need to include mechanisms to ensure that jobs created provide minimal barriers to entry, are well-paid, offer opportunities for stable employment and benefits, and support unionization. These components will help ensure that the new climate economy will not just create jobs, but sustain worker and community well-being and create equitable opportunities for all.
Federal policy opportunities by investment area
Renewable energy
Extend investment tax credits and production tax credits for renewable energy
Reauthorize tax incentives for clean energy manufacturing facilities through section 48C of the tax code
Expand grant and loan programs that help rural communities finance renewable energy, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Energy for America Program (REAP)
Energy efficiency
Extend tax incentives for efficiency upgrades in homes and residential buildings, including the existing homes tax credit (tax code sec. 25C) and new homes tax credit (sec. 45L)
Extend tax incentives for efficiency upgrades in new and existing commercial buildings (sec. 179D)
Boost funding level for block grant programs that channel money directly to state and local agencies for efficiency upgrades, including the Weatherization Assistance Program, State Energy Program, and Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grants program, and create a comparable program for industrial facilities
Expand grant and loan programs targeted at rural communities, including the USDA REAP program, Energy Efficiency Conservation Loan Program, and Rural Energy Savings Program
Transmission, distribution, and storage
Create tax credits to incentivize the build out of transmission projects that are regionally significant and can enable renewable energy integration on the grid and stand-alone energy storage technologies
Reauthorize tax credits to incentivize domestic clean energy manufacturing facilities (sec. 48C)
Reauthorize the Department of Energy’s Smart Grid Investment Grant program to promote investments in smart grid technologies
Authorize the Department of Transportation to make transmission infrastructure projects, especially those that emphasize the integration of renewable energy, eligible under the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act loan guarantee program
Expand loans and loan guarantees through USDA Electric Infrastructure Loan & Loan Guarantee to help finance transmission and distribution systems in rural areas
Create a program to provide grants and technical assistance to rural electric cooperatives to deploy energy storage and microgrid technologies
Environmental remediation of abandoned fossil fuel infrastructure
Increase federal funding to clean up abandoned coal mine sites
Create a new program for plugging and remediation at orphaned oil and gas well sites
Tree restoration on federal lands
Remove the funding cap on the Reforestation Trust Fund
Increase appropriations for programs that fund restoration projects on federal land
Tree restoration on non-federal lands
Implement a refundable or transferable tax credit for natural carbon sequestration
Enhance USDA conservation programs to incentivize natural carbon sequestration and reduce transaction costs for landowners, especially underserved landowners
Provide additional funding through state and local grants and the State and Private Forestry programs of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS)
Source: The Economic Benefits of New Climate Economy in Rural America, 2021
Rural America’s Crucial Role in U.S. Climate Change Policies
Rural America will be indispensable in enabling the country to reach net-zero emissions: rural farmers, ranchers, and forest owners manage large segments of lands that hold enormous opportunities for climate mitigation. Rural areas are also crucial for clean energy development: 99% of all onshore wind capacity in the country is located in rural areas, as is the majority of utility-scale solar capacity.
U.S. climate policy, informed by the unique needs and context of rural America, can not only harness the power of rural communities to address climate change but also generate significant economic opportunities for these communities. This approach will be essential to helping the nation meet ambitious decarbonization goals while creating millions of good jobs across the country.
The historic city of Cleveland, Ohio is situated on the shores of Lake Erie and the banks of the Cuyahoga River. Like many major metropolitan areas throughout the United States, it is facing multiple challenges simultaneously. The climate crisis, loss of nature, and long-standing structural inequities threaten residents, the city as a whole, and the natural ecosystem. To combat these growing crises, The Trust for Public Land is working with government and community partners to address climate and park equity through a people and data-driven approach.
Parks are not perks — they are essential infrastructure for healthy, connected, equitable, resilient, and empowered communities.
The Trust for Public Land and its partners are using cutting edge data and science to support resilient planning efforts, economic benefit studies to demonstrate the value of increasing investments in parks and nature-based climate solutions, and deep community engagement to transform neighborhoods and deliver improved climate, health and equity outcomes.
Climate Smart Cities – Cleveland.With funding from U.S. EPA and NOAA, The Trust for Public Land partnered with the City of Cleveland to support resiliency goals using the power of parks and green infrastructure. The project team, made up of city officials and community-based organizations, developed a publicly available web mapping decision support tool that pinpoints where investments in parks and green infrastructure are most needed to improve local resilience and equity. The tool brings together environment, land use, health and equity data to enable multi-benefit analysis. The tool shows, down to the parcel level, where investments in parks and green infrastructure can simultaneously:
Cool extreme heat;
Absorb stormwater runoff;
Protect against lake and river flooding; and
Connect neighborhoods to reduce transportation emissions.
But identifying where park and other nature-based investments are needed to build local climate, health, and equity outcomes was only the first step. City officials and others wanted to know the value of parks.
Economic Benefits of Cleveland Metroparks. Economists with The Trust for Public Land conducted a study to evaluate the economic benefits provided by Cleveland Metroparks – the manager of the regional park system. The findings were astounding. The existing park system creates $873 million in economic value each year (figure1). That includes the over $20 million in stormwater infiltration and $8 million in reduced air pollution value a year. Supporting the Cleveland Metroparks system values, further analysis using iTree Landscape shows the tree canopy found throughout the city, including on parks and public land, stores approximately 171,000 tons of carbon (valued at nearly $30 million) and sequesters nearly 4,500 tons annually (valued at $767,000 per year).
Park Equity +: Building on the Climate Smart Cities partnership and the valuation of Cleveland Metroparks, economists with The Trust for Public Land went one step further and identified the five highest-priority neighborhoods for park development in the city and then projected the likely economic benefits of future investment. New and improved parks in these five neighborhoods would bring an additional 10,600 individuals, including 2,850 children, who do not currently have easy access to a park, within a 10-minute walk of a park. Park investments in these neighborhoods are also expected to produce an estimated $10.1 million in economic benefits over the next ten years. Click here to learn more and view the research summaries by neighborhood.
This work continues to build momentum for increased investment in parks and green space. In 2021, Cleveland became one of the first seven cities to participate in the Urban Drawdown Initiative – an effort to quantify the carbon capture potential of urban greening and improved land management practices.
While there is still a lot of work to be done, these planning efforts and economic valuation studies have laid the groundwork for transformational urban greening that can draw down carbon, improve resilience, and help address long-standing inequities for the community.
Eboni Hall spends her days split between research, increasing urban forestry education at institutions, assisting youth in navigating their urban forestry career path and mentoring students, all while working to achieve Tree Equity. Photo Credit: Eboni Hall.
When Eboni Hall first entered college, she thought for sure she was going to become a sports therapist. She wanted to learn kinesiology, the study of body movement and muscles. It was a sensible choice, something familiar, and a far cry from her ultimate path in urban forestry.
She’d grown up in Baton Rouge, La., entrenched in a love for natural areas, her childhood full of making mud pies, climbing trees and reading books outside. Despite that connection to nature, she’d never really thought about urban forestry as a concept, let alone a potential career path. “I remember thinking, urban forestry? That sounds like some- thing for tree huggers,” she says.
It was during a summer program called BAYOU, Beginning Agricultural Youth Opportunities Unlimited, at Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, that Hall’s world changed. Hall is young, Black and a woman, quite different from the typical description of a forester, a field long dominated by white men. “People of color don’t have a reflection of themselves in this field, and they get discouraged,” says Hall. “Maybe if people see I’m able to do it, they’ll think they can.”
The BAYOU program introduced Hall to an array of environmental science disciplines and job opportunities that redefined urban forestry for her. She went on to study the discipline at Southern, the only four-year university that offers a bachelor’s degree in urban forestry. Eventually, she earned her Ph.D. and now works as the senior manager of urban forestry education at American Forests. Hall has made it her life’s mission to provide other young people with the inspiration she found through BAYOU. In doing so, she is shaping one of the most important roles for building social and environmental equity and combating climate change.
Creating the Next Generation of Urban Foresters
Photo Credit: David Meshoulam.
People who work in urban forestry are addressing climate change, as well as social and environmental equity. City trees help absorb carbon from the atmosphere and make people’s lives better by providing shade, filtering the air, lifting moods and more. Trees also create jobs. But not everyone benefits equally from trees, largely because socioeconomically disadvantaged communities historically have lacked trees. A blossoming movement toward Tree Equity — which, simply put, is about ensuring every city neighborhood has enough trees so that every person benefits from them — is fueling the demand for more urban foresters. In fact, jobs for people who can plant, prune and maintain trees in cities are expected to grow 10% by 2028.
Attracting young people to the field is essential to growing that workforce. Hall and others like her are taking on the challenge, educating youth about urban forestry and related fields as a career and helping create clear pathways for professional advancement. The first step is making sure these future foresters understand that city trees are more than something nice to look at.
Trees as Critical Urban Infrastructure
In America’s cities, trees help the environment, but they also play a vital role in fulfilling our basic needs. That is particularly true during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Green spaces are a peaceful place to go to find refuge. When you don’t have access to them, you often are surrounded by unhealthy environmental conditions, and it has impacts on mental health,” says Suleima Mednick-Coles, one of Hall’s mentees and a student in the Black Scholars program at the University of San Francisco.
Making the connection between the importance of caring for trees and how they benefit day-to-day life is critical to growing interest in urban forestry, says Sarah Anderson, director of Career Pathways at American Forests. “Communities with low tree canopy cover tend to have higher rates of unemployment, and if you don’t have access to trees, you can’t make money caring for them.”
Job opportunities to plant and care for trees are expected to rise, thanks in part to the important role cities will play in the global trillion trees movement. In order to meet that need, American Forests has set a goal that by 2030 at least 100,000 people, particularly those from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, will enter jobs in forestry. “I think it’s something that’s really a no-brainer to invest in,” Anderson says. “And it’s a well-paying one, with average entry-level tree workers earning about $20 an hour, roughly $40,000 per year.”
Paving the Way
Suleima Mednick-Coles is cobbling together her interests as an amalgamation of multiple majors and minors. Photo Credit: Suleima Mednick-Coles.
One obstacle to building an urban forestry workforce is that many young people don’t know how to access the field, or that it even exists. American Forests is working with Southern University and groups like Speak for the Trees, Boston to raise awareness of, and build bridges to, the field.
American Forests has developed two guides to help individuals map their journeys to urban forestry careers: the Career Pathways Exploration Guide and the Career Pathways Action Guide. Geared toward people who could benefit most from joining the field, these guides spotlight educational pathways and entry-level job training programs that train and place individuals who face barriers to employment so that they can enter the field. There are pilot projects in six cities: Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, Providence, R.I., and Syracuse, N.Y.
The local programs also try to provide additional services, such as transportation and childcare, both significant barriers to job entry in communities where people are struggling financially. “It’s all about meeting people where they’re at, physically, emotionally, age-wise,” says David Meshoulam, executive director of Speak for the Trees, Boston.
Job shadowing, paid apprenticeship and pre- apprenticeship programs can remove barriers to finding viable careers. “Many youth live in the now and go into survival mode in order to provide for their families,” says Hall. “They can’t afford to stop working to improve a skill set.” That’s where partnerships, programs, resources and expertise provided by American Forests come into play.
A Field with Many Disciplines
Photo Credit: Bouyant Partners/American Forests
One exciting outlook in the field of urban forestry is how expansive it is. Traditionally, urban forestry has been synonymous with arboriculture and tree maintenance, Hall says. “But urban forestry encompasses so much more than trees alone.”
An array of disciplines have jobs that fall under the urban forestry umbrella: environmental law, hydrology, psychology, soil science, urban planning and public health, to name a few.
Currently, Southern University and A&M College is the only university in the United States that offers a designated degree in urban forestry. Students elsewhere often have to create their own paths. For example, at the University of San Francisco, Mednick-Coles is cobbling together her interests as an amalgamation of multiple majors and minors that encompasses international studies, sustainable development and environmental justice and African-American studies. To entice and prepare students, Hall hopes more colleges and universities will begin offering urban forestry programs, making more connections to other disciplines and utilizing an interdisciplinary urban forestry curriculum she developed.
Today, Hall spends her days split between research, increasing urban forestry education at institutions, assisting youth in navigating their urban forestry career path and mentoring students, all while working to achieve Tree Equity.
“Don’t wait too long to take that exam,” Hall teases, while on a recent Zoom call with Jordan Davis. Davis is about to graduate with a degree in urban forestry from Southern University. He entered college bent on studying engineering when he discovered the BAYOU program and a new future. The exam Hall is referring to is the
International Society of Arboriculture Credential, a requirement to become a certified arborist. Davis laughs good-naturedly. “I won’t. I won’t,” he says.
He’s thinking of returning to his hometown of Jackson, La., to provide urban forestry community outreach. A lot of students get interested in jobs they learn about in high school, Davis says. He wants urban forestry to be one of them. He’s thinking of someday launching his own arboriculture business. His family even started a company, Carpet Cuts, LLC, a lawn care business that incorporates tree care. His face beams with pure optimism.
Morgan Heim, a conservation journalist based in Oregon’s forest country, wrote this story for American Forests.
Despite the many benefits that trees provide, research suggests that tree canopy is unequally distributed in U.S. cities with low-income neighborhoods and communities of color often having less tree cover. The inequitable distribution of urban trees furthers social inequities and has serious implications for the health, wealth and resiliency of people living in cities. Two of U.S. Nature4Climate’s coalition members are tackling the issue of urban tree cover head on, taking slightly different approaches to this work. Taken together, these two studies highlight the important role urban forestry programs can play in slowing climate change, reducing social injustices, creating economic opportunities, and making communities more livable.
The Nature Conservancy – The Urban Tree Cover Disparity in US Urbanized Areas
Tree planting at Garden Place Academy in Denver’s Globeville neighborhood.
The research shows that inequality in tree cover between low- and high-income neighborhoods is widespread in the United States, occurring in 92% of the urban areas studied. On average, there was 15.2% more tree cover in high-income areas than in low-income areas. The average surface temperature differential was roughly 3⁰F, but in more than a dozen cities the differential exceeded 5⁰F. Patterns regarding race were similar, with neighborhoods of predominately people of color having lower tree cover and higher surface temperature in most U.S. cities.
The greatest tree inequality was found in the Northeast of the United States, where low-income neighborhoods in some urbanized areas have 30% less tree cover and are7⁰F hotter compared to high-income neighborhoods. Even after controlling for population density and built-up intensity, the link between income, race, and tree cover was significant. Cities with greater income inequality had greater differences in tree cover between high- and low-income blocks. Another important variable in explaining variation in tree cover was population density, with urban areas with higher median population density, such as New York City and Philadelphia having lower tree cover, presumably because there is simply less area to fit trees into more densely developed areas.
The Nature Conservancy found greater disparity in tree cover in the suburbs in low density areas compared to the urban core. Greater inequality in tree cover in suburban areas could be due to the relatively greater importance of actions on private land. It may be that low-income households are less able to afford the cost of planting and maintaining trees. Additionally, low-income households are more likely to be in rental units and are thus less involved in making decisions about land management, while owners are primarily interested in reducing maintenance costs and thus may have less of an incentive to plant and maintain trees. This finding has important policy implications since currently most of the funding and resources for urban forestry programs are directed to major metropolitan areas. Increasing tree planting and maintenance in suburbs could more effectively address tree cover disparities since there is less pavement and density allowing for more room to plant trees.
Overall, The Nature Conservancy’s findings illustrate that inequality in tree cover is widespread and pervasive in American cities and deserves policy attention. Tree planting will need to occur through public sector investment and maintenance on publicly owned land. Increased investment could be more strategically applied if government agencies responsible for urban forestry actively partnered with public health agencies to maximize benefits for both people and nature.
Additionally, tree planting needs to occur on private land and incentives and regulations must be enacted to motivate the private sector to engage in tree planting. The good news is that several programs like this already exist, such as tree protection ordinances, green area ratios in planning codes, and incentives for tree planting from electric utilities. In addition to establishing new trees, it will be critically important to maintain and care for existing trees, particularly mature trees that provide ecosystem services and benefits to communities.
American Forests – Urban Trees Help Slow Climate Change and Advance Tree Equity
When thinking about how to advance Tree Equity and mitigate climate change, it is important to consider projected changes to urban tree cover. The fact is, we are losing tree canopy in cities. And it’s not a problem that is going away. American Forests’ new report on Climate Change and Urban Forests found that in U.S. urban areas, we are losing one tree for every two trees planted or naturally regenerated. There are several factors that contribute to tree loss including, natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, insects, and diseases), urban expansion and development, improper planting practices and attrition. American Forests projects that 8.3% of existing tree canopy will be lost by 2060.
American Forests looked at county-level data nationwide across different scenarios for both existing urbanized areas and the projected expansion of these areas by 2060 to determine what it would take to achieve to increase tree canopy by 10 percent. To sustain urban tree cover through 2060, they found that about 25 million trees would need to be planted annually. On average, this planting equates to a national rate of one new tree annually for every 3 acres of urban land. However, maintaining existing tree canopy will not be enough.
A 10 percent increase in tree cover is needed nationwide to meaningfully advance Tree Equity and address climate change. This will require planting 31.4 million trees every year and an investment of at least $8.9 billion in urban forestry in the U.S. every year. If we are successful, trees would cover 43.3 percent of U.S. urban areas on average. In addition to planting more trees, it is necessary to increase investment in efforts to monitor and take care of existing trees, which are often larger and more established than planted trees. Scaling up urban forestry efforts would also support more than 228,000 jobs and store almost a billion metric tons of carbon – the same impact as removing nearly 200,000 cars from the road each year. And there would be a savings of nearly $1.6 billion a year from things like avoided asthma-related emergency room visits.
American Forest’ research can help guide decisions about how many trees we need to plant in the United States and the required investment to successfully manage our urban forests.
Key Takeaways
We need a multiplicity of voices advocating for urban trees and working to advance science, policy, funding, and collaboration around urban forestry. Studies like those conducted by The Nature Conservancy and American Forests should inspire conversation among environmental organizations, local government and municipalities, policymakers, health advocates and local communities to determine how to best address equity needs in cities and avoid devastating tree loss.
Caity Varian is the Digital Communications Manager for U.S. Nature4Climate.
