Trees for Community Recovery: A National Urban Forests Expansion Campaign
Connecting Community Resilience and Economic Recovery
In the summer of 2020, as we reconciled ourselves to a long-term quarantine and watched the growing impacts of a global economic unraveling, many people projected that no matter who was elected President of the United States in November, the new Administration would be compelled to initiate a massive economic stimulus initiative. Assuming that job creation would be the dominant theme of any stimulus package, CRS (formerly known as the Urban Drawdown Initiative) and others anticipated a huge opportunity to scale natural climate solutions by illustrating the perfect alignment that exists between climate and community resilience work with the national imperative to create good jobs and stimulate economic recovery. What follows is an overview of the founding of a new initiative—Trees for Community Recovery (T4CR)—and its efforts to raise awareness and support of urban and community forests and grow the economic sector that maintains them.
Natural Climate Solutions: Far & Away The Biggest Job Creators
Long before the current Green New Deal was proposed, solid data already existed to demonstrate the many co-benefits of job creation in the “green infrastructure” sector. During the recession of 2008, the Obama administration and a number of think tanks examined employment data to determine which sectors could create the most jobs with federal investment. This analysis was then taken up by various academic researchers, who scoured the labor data of past periods of U.S. economic recovery. Robert Pollin at the University of Massachusetts analyzed jobs created per $1M federal dollars spent across a broad range of different conventional and “green” infrastructure sectors.
Among Pollin and co-authors’ most striking findings was that the most effective investments to quickly create jobs were in the natural resources sector: agriculture, forestry, etc. In many cases, the number of jobs per $1M dollars that could be created were 2-3x the number of jobs developed through other infrastructure categories like roads and bridges, new public facilities, or other large construction projects. Across a wide range of related natural resource sector work—from fire hazards in our increasingly fire-prone forests and reclaiming degraded rural lands and waterways, to planting, protecting and maintaining urban forests, environmental stewardship turns out to be a great investment in creating living wage jobs and restoring or conserving critical natural resources. Not surprisingly, this is the same type of work that was the initial focus of the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps in the early 1930s.
The fact that natural resources sectors employ many more people than other conventional infrastructure projects holds true even when compared with “green infrastructure” investments like solar and wind. This is because green infrastructure projects are capital intensive and often require longer lead-up timeframes to prepare and train a specialized workforce. According to Pollin, the natural resources sector still outperforms green energy sectors by as much as two-to-one when it comes to job creation.
So, as we settled into our various isolated COVID-19 safe workspaces, a number of organizations including the Center for Regenerative Solutions, Trust for Public Land, Urban Sustainability Directors Network, American Forests, Davey Tree, and others began to formulate a proposal to the new administration and Congress for the urban application of natural resource investments. We prepared our case for why a significant amount of funding in any new infrastructure package—on the scale of billions—should be devoted to investments in urban forests in communities of all sizes across the country. We’re calling this campaign Trees for Community Recovery (T4CR).
Urban Forests: Critical Infrastructure in Widespread Decline
Most of us take urban forests for granted—an aesthetic backdrop to our daily lives that we hardly notice and assume will always be there—till it isn’t. Over the past 2-3 decades, this critical green infrastructure that silently provides billions of dollars worth of life-supporting and protective services—shade and cooling, shelter against extreme weather, absorption of stormwater, purification of air and water—has been gradually declining. A host of causes from exotic pests and diseases, to development, to increasing weather extremes and climate change have resulted in substantial losses of this living infrastructure—public infrastructure that was thoughtfully “built” and maintained by our predecessors, in many cases 50 to 100+ years ago.
Fewer Trees = Higher Temperatures, Increased Flood Dangers, and Worsening Air Quality for People Who Live in Cities
Decades of insufficient funding to sustain and protect existing urban trees combined with rapid and unreplaced tree removal for development have resulted in numerous, reinforcing, measurable risks, as seen by the flood and heat events plaguing U.S. Cities each year. When trees are removed, they are almost always replaced by impervious surfaces—sidewalks, roads, buildings.
Deadly Heat
These impervious surfaces are a prime driver of the extreme heat events we are seeing in urban areas, including increased nighttime temperatures that make it difficult or impossible for people in urban areas to cool off during extended summer heatwaves. According to an analysis conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, by mid-century, “Nearly one-third of the nation’s 481 urban areas with a population of 50,000 people or more will experience an average of 30 or more days per year with a heat index above 105°F.” (A heat index measures heat + humidity, or simply put, the temperature our bodies actually experience). Currently, there are only 3 places in the United States that consistently experience that kind of heat: 2 in the deserts of California and 1 in southern Arizona.
Floods
An unsettling truth is that global warming also means increases in floods. As air temperatures rise, the atmosphere is capable of holding more water. The over 1℃ increase in global temperature that has already taken place has added more than 5% to the amount of water circulating as vapor in the atmosphere--this is equivalent to more than 5 times the total volume of water in the Great Lakes (70% of the fresh water on the planet).
Trees play a vital role in reducing floodwater impacts. Studies show that trees can dramatically increase stormwater retention time, reduce rainfall intensity, increase infiltration, and reduce overall flood impacts. As nearly all urban areas will now face increased flooding risks, urban forests will play a critical role in minimizing these impacts.
Air Quality
Urban and community forests are also largely unrecognized for their significant contributions to improving local air quality. A recent analysis of forests and air quality found that trees absorb over 800,000 metric tons of air pollutants nationally, supporting the reduction or prevention of over 500,000 cases of respiratory illnesses such as asthma.
Climate Change
The IPCC’s recent analysis of climate change and current efforts to address it—the Global Warming of 1.5℃—issued a new warning: emissions reduction alone will no longer be sufficient to stabilize the climate. We must now initiate a large-scale drawdown of CO2 from the atmosphere. In its subsequent report, Climate Change and Land, the IPCC further indicated that the only near-term strategy for rapidly increasing carbon drawdown is through natural climate solutions like forests. For every ton of new-wood growth, about 1.5 tons of CO2 are removed from the air and 1.07 tons of life-giving oxygen is produced. On a national scale, urban and community forests play a major role in offsetting emissions caused by fossil fuel use and other causes. Urban and community forests are estimated to capture more than 15% of the total carbon captured by all of the forests—including working and natural forests—in the US.
Urban Forests as Community Protection & Recovery
We are not prepared for this future. Our urban forests are currently insufficient to shelter us from these conditions, and they are (in many places) in further decline. We must make significant and sustained investments now in our urban forests to make them the powerful climatic-buffering assets that they can be—and that our communities urgently need them to be.
Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees, But It Can Make Trees Grow
With strategic and coordinated investment from both the federal government and a consortium of state and local governments, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector we can protect and rapidly expand urban and community forests in ways that will create tens of thousands of jobs while simultaneously:
Sequestering (removing) millions of tons of carbon that has already been released into the atmosphere;
Capturing and holding tens of millions of gallons of stormwater, mitigating flood events;
Assimilating (neutralizing) hundreds of millions of pounds of various air pollutants;
Providing critical habit to an increasingly diverse urban wildlife system that maintains the critical life support functions humanity is going to increasingly depend on;
And protecting hundreds of millions of Americans from the extreme heat we must now endure as we work to stabilize climate.
Shovel Ready: Community Forestry Strategies
Click image to download. More at the T4CR website.
Over the past year, an organizing group including Center for Regenerative Solutions (formerly UDI), Trust for Public Land, Urban Sustainability Directors Network, American Forests, and Davey Tree have convened a campaign called Trees for Community Recovery (T4CR). Working with a growing coalition of local jurisdictions, land trusts, local equity-based workforce organizations, local to national conservation organizations, community colleges, and a host of other partners, this consortium is moving on both the policy level to increase federal funding support, and at the local and grassroots level. These implementation strategies are designed to demonstrate how communities can achieve rapid scale-up of urban forestry training and deployment programs that would hire thousands of new workers to plant, protect, and maintain hundreds of thousands of trees within months of funding deployment.
Equity is a core objective and design criterion for all of these efforts. These vanguard city strategies are being formulated in collaboration with organizations working with and representing historically underserved communities to ensure that investments are directed first to improving forestry conditions in the most vulnerable and historically underserved communities. Workforce development strategies are being coordinated with organizations capable of bringing these economic opportunities into communities and constituencies that have not typically benefited from green infrastructure development efforts.
The three overarching policy objectives of the Trees for Community Recovery campaign are:
To grow community resilience through increased federal investment in the protection and planting of trees in urban and community forests.
To prioritize equity through the strategic distribution of environmental resources
To create jobs through the expansion of urban forestry workforces
More information about the Trees for Community Recovery Campaign can be found at https://www.trees4community.com and in this overview.
Early Leaders at the Local Government Level
A number of communities have stepped forward as early leaders to invest time and resources into formulating “shovel-ready” strategies that can serve as templates for rapidly scaling up the urban forestry sector in ways that can be replicated by many more communities to follow. These vanguard cities include Pittsburg, PA, Cleveland, OH, Minneapolis, MN, Chicago, IL, Newark, NJ, Denver, CO, and San Francisco, CA. Briefings are being planned with the Biden Administration and Congress for late June 2021 to share these shovel-ready strategies. An initial letter signed by more than 30 mayors and county officials was delivered by the campaign to The Biden Administration earlier this spring.
In Denver and Cleveland, previous efforts to significantly increase tree planting are now being expanded through partnerships with public, private, and non-profit organizations; with both cities aiming to plant around 10,00 trees per year. In Pittsburgh, urban forest protection and expansion is being integrated into plans to develop the 600-acre Hughs Park, slated to be the second-largest public park East of the Mississippi. In Chicago, a consortium of groups led by the Chicago Regional Trees Initiative is pioneering both regional urban and community forest strategies that include the development of carbon offsets for urban forest carbon capture. In Newark, a major focus of forest job development will be enhancing stewardship of the uplands watershed area that is vital to providing clean drinking water to the Newark area. These are just a few vanguard examples of cities on the vanguard of “growing” our nation’s green infrastructure.
The Coming “Big Moment” for Trees
The work of these leading cities—and many others—to reverse trends of disinvestment and neglect of our urban and community forests cannot be accomplished through local or even private investment alone. Urban and community forests are a part of a national “green” infrastructure that is vital to our national interests and continued prosperity as a nation. Just as we need to make major federal investments to rebuild the nation’s electrical grid, transportation infrastructure, and public health care systems, we also need to grow and sustain significant increases in our living infrastructure, starting with our urban and community forests.
It appears increasingly likely that the only opportunity for significant action of this sort in the next year will take place during the budget reconciliation process that will happen during summer 2021. This is where the Biden Administration’s major infrastructure package will be finalized through what will certainly be a frenzied negotiation in which the many interests and priorities vying to secure federal funding will be considered, and often pitted against each other. t this time, it is especially important to both remember and emphasize the fact that urban and community forests are not a narrow, single interest. Communities that are able to strategically protect and expand their urban forest canopy will create multiple, intersecting benefits—creating living-wage jobs and career opportunities, reducing extreme heat and other climate change-related impacts, improving public health and air quality, mitigating increasing flood dangers, and maintaining the desirable living conditions that support thriving communities.
What You Can Do Now: Add Your Voice to the Call for Action
This is a critical moment during which those who recognize the importance of our urban and community forests must make their voices heard. A summary of key policy objectives and talking points to assist in this process can be found at the Trees for Community Recovery website. It will be continually updated as we approach this historic moment to provide information on how you can have the greatest input/impact on this effort.
Irrespective of the outcomes of this summer’s political debates and funding priority horse-trading, there is a growing movement of communities that understand the vital role urban and community forests play in the present and future well-being of their homes. There remains much to clarify and understand about how best to create and maintain thriving urban forests—but it can be done.