Research has proven trees are invaluable to urban landscapes. The question now: Why aren't more cities listening?

By Alexis Harte

San Antonio Mayor Ed Garza was a keynote speaker at the conference

While Hurricane Isabel pummeled the East Coast in September, leaving shattered trees in her wake, more than 800 urban forestry advocates, practitioners, and researchers bunkered down in rainy San Antonio for American Forests' 2003 National Urban Forestry Conference, "Engineering Green."

Although Isabel's march grabbed the healdines, a reporter looking for a more harrowing tale of urban tree loss would have done better at the conference. Cities have lost nearly one-quarter of their tree cover in the last 11 years, that fact simply has not made headlines.

And that simple fact offered perhaps the most enduring lesson to come out of the conference: The urban forestry movement has to do a better job of convincing the public and policymakers of the importance of integrating trees into our communities.

That trees vastly improve the quality of life in our cities is no longer idle speculation. Over the last 25 years countless practitioners have documented the value of urban forests in cleaning air, managing stormwater runoff, saving energy, reducing crime, and improving public health and psychological well-being. While the conference program was packed with diverse presentations describing these benefits, the overriding refrain remained: We have convinced ourselves, why can't we convince others?

"We have successfully shown that trees have a range of ecosystem values," said Gary Moll, vice president of American Forests' Urban Forest Center, during the opening session. "We want people to take that message home and, with the best possible data, convince their city leaders and budget officials to incorporate those values in an ongoing way."

Ten years ago, this directive might have fallen on deaf ears. Yet a resolution penned at the 2003 U.S. Conference of Mayors suggests that elected officials in the nation's largest cities may be ready to listen. More than just a set of vague nods, the resolution explicitly addresses urban forests' value in improving urban air quality, conserving energy, and controlling sedimentation and water runoff from nonpoint sources. Perhaps most significantly, the mayors resolved to work closely with the U.S. Forest Service and other state and federal agencies to reverse urban tree decline.

Despite the U.S. Forest Service's recent influx of money into municipal urban forestry programs, our national "tree deficit" continues to grow. In 2001 American Forests estimated that deficit at more than 634 million trees. And although urban forestry has matured since it was launched about 25 years ago, many cities are struggling to simply slow their rate of deforestation, let alone replant their canopies.

"We are moving from a program that was largely aesthetics-based to one that is science-based," Joel Holtrop, the Forest Service's deputy chief for state and private forestry, said in the conference's opening session. "Now we must use this new focus to influence community members and policymakers."

A quarter-century of intense research and advocacy is beginning to pay off. The movement has developed tools and trained professionals through accredited urban forestry programs whose existence, Holtrop says, "would have been unthinkable 25 years ago." While the urgency of the message pervaded the conference, a number of themes emerged that together offer a road map of how that might be accomplished.

Grassroots to GIS

Today the urban and community forestry movement consists of a wide range of groups working together-from large federal agencies and national nonprofits to local tree planting groups and individual activists. In many ways, the movement rests on the backs of these latter partners.

"Small nonprofits often effect the greatest ground-level change by working directly with mayors, city council, and community members," says Alice Ewan Walker, executive director of Alliance for Community Trees, which provides a national forum for many local tree planting and environmental education groups.

"These groups are launching sophisticated job-training programs, tackling environmental justice issues, providing youth programs that offer career track opportunities, and conducting the public policy work that actually changes government policy and strengthens tree ordinances at the local level."

An overarching goal of the conference was to provide these smaller groups with up-to-date mapping and analysis tools and research data from national groups like the U.S. Forest Service and American Forests, as well as a tool-kit of creative approaches from other local groups working on similar issues. By strengthening capacity "where the rubber hits the road," the 2003 conference laid the groundwork for potentially significant change on the horizon.

That potential will undoubtedly be helped by the U.S. Conference of Mayors' action in support of urban trees. The recently adopted Mayor's Resolution acknowledged that their trees provide more than just pleasant shade and a stroke of color. Shown current data from American Forests and the U.S. Forest Service, the mayors pointed to the role a healthy canopy plays in helping their cities abide by state and national clean air and water legislation.

San Antonio's mayor, Ed Garza, a keynote speaker at the conference, earlier told American Forests magazine, "The [recent] study drew attention to the regional and local changes caused by deforestation in San Antonio since 1985, especially the negative impacts on the urban heat island, storm water runoff, and air quality."

Refining the body of evidence that links tree loss to pollution, U.S. Forest Service project leader Dave Novak showed how heavy deforestation in the greater Atlanta area over the last few decades has increased regional ozone concentrations by 14 percent. Novak says he hopes that these forthcoming results will encourage more cities to develop proactive, ambitious tree planting goals as a primary strategy for meeting clean air standards.

The EPA's Clean Water Act and, in particular, Stormwater Phase II, offers a new set of opportunities for urban forestry. Across the United States, hundreds of cities are developing stormwater management plans, outreach programs, and management policies under Stormwater Phase II. By explicitly addressing nonpoint source pollution, Stormwater Phase II offers new opportunities for urban foresters to include forestry and tree canopy initiatives in local environmental programs.

Those cities will be helped by the availability of high-tech imagery that makes it easier to accurately assess the state of urban trees. In documenting trends in U.S. tree canopy loss over the last 30 years, American Forests has used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to conduct more than 40 urban and regional ecosystem analyses. The studies' results have had a far-reaching impact on local policies, from strengthening tree ordinances to helping establish minimum canopy requirements.

Also expected to help is a new Rapid Ecosystem Analysis that American Forests debuted at its booth. Visitors to the booth could quickly receive a detailed analysis of their local forest's ecological and economic value. The printed reports, which took less than a minute to generate, also included a press release so that participants could easily communicate the results back home. More than 200 reports were generated at the conference; since then hundreds of other requests have been made for additional reports.

While this kind of new technology helps, placing urban forestry prominently and permanently in yearly municipal budets will require a major shift in bureaucratic thinking. Governments must think of trees as needed services, just like police and fire departments, clean water, treated sewage, and curbside garbage pickup. Several conference sessions focused on new accounting tools and concepts that could help urban trees achieve that status.

One new approach involves GASB 34, a U.S. Government Accounting Standards Board rule that details accounting procedures for a municipality's capital assets such as bridges, road, and other infrastructure. If a city's forest canopy could technically be reclassified as a capital asset (thereby increasing the bond rating), city budget officials would have to include long-range funding for its upkeep under the rule's provisions.

Dudley Hartel, technology transfer specialist with the U.S. Forest Service discussed recent attempts to fit trees' unconventional devaluation status-unlike roads and bridges, trees increase in value with age-into GASB's rather rigid definition of capital assets. "While much work still needs to be done, GASB 34 offers one of the most exciting new approaches for valuing our urban forests," he said.

A Role for Trees

Arguments for urban forestry funding tend to focus on trees' physical and economic benefits: clean air, clean water, and energy savings. While these quantitative data often speak directly to city budget official's purse strings, they only tell part of the story.

Researchers like University of Illinois' Frances Kuo, University of Washington's Kathleen Wolf, and Matt Arnn and Erika Svensen of the Forest Service's Living Memorials Project are conducting groundbreaking research on the contribution of trees and public green space to our social and psychological well being. Kuo urged conference participants to look beyond simply the dollar value of trees in our cities.

Results of these studies offer profound insights into the ways trees influence everything from how we mourn, learn in school, and fight crime to how we cope with anxiety and depression.

More than a century after urban and park planner Fredrick Law Olmsted ruminated on the links between public health and good community design in his article Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns, urban forestry has rediscovered its common ground with the field of public health. David Buchner of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, drew connections between a rise in obesity throughout the world and a decrease in green public space and pedestrian-friendly community design.

Connecting greening projects and quality of life issues resonates across the spectrum of city dwellers, and the San Antonio conference reflected many of the faces that encompasses. The National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council (NUCFAC), recognizing underserved communities' desire to become involved in urban forestry locally and nationally, provided funds for 152 minority fellowships. Melanie Kirk, of Texas Cooperative Extension, recruited and coordinated scholarship recipients-many of whom had never been on a plane, let alone to a professional conference. Their enthusiasm was evident.

Eagle Eye, a national nonprofit that connects people of color from urban communities to trees and urban and community forestry, turned out in force. Attending his first conference, 14-year-old Eagle Eye peer leader Himanshu Dubey was surprised to meet so many other like-minded young people from around the country.

"I was able to network and bond on several levels, both personally and on a peer level, because we talked about how each of us are improving our communities by direct education, community service, and advocacy," said Dubey.

He talked with various members of the urban community forestry movement and commented, "I realized that there are so many people in this world, but not even 1 percent of the population is doing anything to save our environment.

"But I will be among that 1 percent!" he added.

David Romain, a physical geography teacher from Richmond, California, was impressed with the level of commitment he saw among the younger attendees.

"I'm convinced that this generation of young people will ask some of the critical questions,' he said. "They are going to be the wrench that will turn things around."

It's enthusiasm like that, together with the presentations and the spirited informal discussions at the conference that makes a powerful case for increased funding for urban forstry. Now, only the audience is missing.

"The urban forestry movement has frankly not done a good job reaching out to urban people," American Forests' executive director Deborah Gangloff told attendees. "The key is marketing-not telling people what you want them to hear, but listening to what their concerns are."

While a congressional authorization of $370 million annually for urban and community forestry may seem like a generous sum, given the enormity of the asset it is clearly insufficient, Gangloff said. She compared it to investing $50 for upkeep in a home valued at $60,000 and watching it fall apart and lose value.

Virtually all the net population growth over the next half-century will be in cities, Gangloff said, where already 75 percent of the world's population lives. In the U.S., alone, city dwellers are realizing roughly $400 billion in ecosystem services from urban tree cover.

Gangloff closed the 2003 National Urban Forestry Conference with a call to action. "Go see your mayor," she urged. "You now have the solutions they need. We must educate decisionmakers at all levels about the benefits of investing in urban forestry and maximize the funding leverage by supporting projects that benefit the greatest number of people. In this way, we will build a much broader constituency for urban forestry." AF

Alexis Harte writes from his home in Berkeley, California. [TOP]