
Photo Credit: Rick D'Elia, D'Elia Photographic / American Forests

Photo Credit: Rick D'Elia, D'Elia Photographic / American Forests
RODNEY SMITH NEVER MINDED THE SUMMER HEAT as a kid in Phoenix. He remembers riding bikes with his cousins to citrus orchards in the southern part of the city where he grew up, running through fields —watermelon, alfalfa, cotton — and climbing trees. “To us, heat was not even a thing,” he says.
But that’s not the case today. “You don’t see kids playing outside anymore,” the 38-year-old says. “It’s more heat, and the amount of asphalt and concrete and buildings that store up that heat. There is no respite.” The farmland of Smith’s childhood has since been paved over, big box stores and fast-food chains lining the streets.
Smith still spends his days outside, despite Phoenix’s ever-intensifying heat. As a garden and community outreach manager for TigerMountain Foundation, an organization centered on community empowerment in South Phoenix, he regularly toils in triple-digit temperatures. “If you’re not conscious of it, this heat will overtake your body,” Smith warns, noting that he regularly checks on his team to ensure they’ve had enough water and adequate rest. “It’s something that you don’t just get used to. You have to take preventative measures. It’s not a joke.”

Photo Credit: Rick D'Elia, D'Elia Photographic / American Forests
He’s right: Exposure to such heat is dangerous. It impacts virtually every system in the body and can lead to heat exhaustion or, worse, life-threatening heat stroke. It can also exacerbate preexisting cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, and takes a toll on mental health.
Phoenix is the hottest city in the United States — and getting hotter. After a record-setting 31 consecutive days hitting at least 110 degrees Fahrenheit last year, the city is on track for 2024 to be its most scorching yet, shattering another record in early September by hitting more than 100 consecutive days over 100 degrees.
This problem isn’t unique to the desert, however. Coast to coast, high-temperature records are shattering, and relentless heat is impacting the lives of nearly everyone. The problem is particularly acute in urban areas, where the asphalt and buildings Smith describes absorb the heat and exacerbate its impacts.

Photo Credit: Rick D'Elia, D'Elia Photographic / American Forests
Thankfully, we have a solution that can help: trees. Tree cover cools the surrounding air and, in places like Phoenix where baseline temperatures are already sweltering (even at night), it can make a dramatic difference — up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit during the day and 22 degrees at night. Trees also absorb pollutants, improving air quality and helping those with pre-existing health conditions that extreme heat may exacerbate. They can help boost mental health and cognitive performance. And, trees also carry financial benefits, helping to lower energy bills and increase property values.
The amount of tree canopy that exists across a city, however, is unequal, a result of discriminatory policies that left communities with a majority people of color and/or lower incomes with little of this life-saving infrastructure. A national movement to advance Tree Equity — a term coined by American Forests — is disrupting these disparities, inclusively and comprehensively, by developing policies that prioritize expanding tree cover in the most vulnerable communities, planting trees where they are most needed, developing a workforce to maintain them, and unlocking investments to continue supporting the equitable expansion of urban forests.
And with extreme heat touching all regions of the U.S., we’ve never needed Tree Equity more.
A PUBLIC HEALTH AND EDUCATION CRISIS

Photo Credit: Rick D'Elia, D'Elia Photographic / American Forests
Dr. Jeremy Hess was working in the emergency department at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center on June 28, 2021, one of the worst days of the Pacific Northwest heat dome that led to 441 deaths across Washington State alone. He describes the stress of the influx of patients with heat-related illness and how it completely overwhelmed the emergency department of another Seattle hospital, Valley Medical Center. In response, Harborview stood up its region disaster medical coordination to divert patients away from Valley to other hospitals with more capacity.
“We certainly are more exposed to extreme heat now and more vulnerable than we used to be,” he says of the city known for its temperate climate. “We are getting a pretty clear picture that these environmental emergencies can really stress our system.”
Hess says his health system is increasingly featuring extreme heat in its preparedness discussions, and notes that one way to lower the demand on the system is reducing population vulnerability.
On a physical level, extreme heat poses an outsized risk to people who regularly have prolonged exposure to it — like Smith and his team in Phoenix — as well as older individuals, those with chronic medical conditions, and
particularly children.

Photo Credit: Rick D'Elia, D'Elia Photographic / American Forests
By mid-July 2024, New York had already experienced two heatwaves and was preparing for a third. For years teachers across the state have been sounding the alarm over dangerously high temperatures in their classrooms, many of which lack air conditioning. Last year, in a report aimed at state lawmakers, New York State United Teachers, a labor union representing around 700,000 professionals, compiled nearly 1,000 personal accounts of educators who have suffered through unhealthy heat conditions — while witnessing the impact on their students.
One teacher from Utica, N.Y, explained in the report that their unairconditioned upper-floor classrooms are unbearable during the first and final weeks of the school year, with temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit. “I’ve had students vomit because it is so hot. I have asthma and struggle to breathe when it is like that. There is no way students can learn anything in that environment, it is completely inhumane.” Another, from nearby Syracuse, N.Y., called out the effect of the radiating sun: “My classroom is on the side of the building where the sun rises in the morning. When it’s warm our classroom runs about 10 degrees warmer than the outside temperature.”

Photo Credit: Jonathan Elias / Paideia Academies
New York’s schools are not alone in navigating this new reality. A Center for Climate Integrity study found that more than 13,700 public schools in the U.S. that did not need air conditioning in 1970 do need it today. That fix will cost billions and take years, if not decades, to implement. Trees can play a vital cooling role in the meantime — and even after the systems get up and running. Planting more trees outside schools can help cool the buildings and provide shady outdoor areas to rest and play. Studies have also shown that students whose schools have more trees outside have higher test scores and graduation rates.
HEAT DOESN’T DISCRIMINATE, BUT OUR POLICIES DO
The City of Chicago, despite its northern location, is no stranger to the impact of heatwaves. In July 1995, a five-day period of extremely high temperatures led to the deaths of more than 700 people. That specific tragedy may live three decades in the past, but similar extreme heat events have and will continue to persist — and more frequently — for the city’s residents.

Photo Credit: Carlos Javier Ortiz
Adella Bass, who has lived in Altgeld Gardens on the far South Side her entire life, has noticed a big shift in Chicago’s summers over the past decade. “They’re longer, they’re hotter, and the heat is more intensified,” she says. After her own family struggled to afford a central air system, Bass has lived the reality of the disparities in how people across the city experience the higher temperatures. “I know what it feels like first-hand having to stay in one space in the basement to try to be cool — and on the hottest days it isn’t cool at all,” she says. “I suffer from heart failure, so part of my health requirement is to remain in cool places because heat raises your blood pressure.”
Bass, who is the health equity director for People for Community Recovery, points out that communities lacking resources, especially Black and brown communities, tend to be the places with the highest heat indexes. Indeed, Heat Watch Chicago, a 2023 heat mapping project, found that neighborhoods on the South Side were the hottest in the city — with some temperatures reaching a maximum heat differential of 22 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. Bass, who served on the advisory board and as a site captain for the project, was clear about the results: “People are really burning in our community.”

Photo Credit: Google Earth

Photo Credit: Google Earth
The disparities that Bass and other Chicagoans experience aren’t unique to that city, of course. Researchers have found that, across the country, communities of color are almost 13 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than white communities, while lower-income neighborhoods are nearly 6 degrees hotter than wealthier ones.
Practices like redlining, which limited credit access for communities of color and promoted unsustainable development of neighborhoods, have directly contributed to such disparities. A 2020 study found that land surface temperatures in formerly redlined areas were as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in non-redlined neighborhoods. These neighborhoods also, unsurprisingly, have far fewer trees than others. On average, low-income communities have 26% less tree cover than wealthier ones, while communities with a majority of people of color have 38% less tree cover than majority-white neighborhoods.
“You can see and you can feel the difference between the affluent communities full of vegetation and the low-income communities full of dirt or asphalt,” says Emma Viera, executive director of Unlimited Potential, a community-focused nonprofit based in Phoenix, who sees the same disparity in her own city. “And it is like that by design.”
THE CASE FOR TREES — AND ADVANCING TREE EQUITY
Roughly 80% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, among environments filled with roads, rooftops and other heat-absorbing infrastructure that contribute to a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect. Because of the lack of trees in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, like those Bass and Viera describe, they experience the heat more intensely.
Such stark differences in temperature “can literally be life or death for people,” says Jake Simon, American Forests’ senior manager for urban forestry in the Southwest. “It’s a problem that is extreme, and it’s only getting more extreme. So, what do we do about that?”
This is where Tree Equity comes into play. This nationwide movement is bringing the life-saving benefits of trees to communities in cities experiencing these disparities.
“Tree Equity is the issue of our time, and we have the data to prove it and the tools to solve it,” says Benita Hussain, American Forests’ chief program officer for Tree Equity. “Addressing climate change, reducing extreme heat and saving lives requires a comprehensive, science-driven approach that places communities that are usually left out of the conversation into the center.”

Photo Credit: Julia Twichell / American Forests
American Forests’ comprehensive Tree Equity work focuses on developing and sharing tools and techniques, building careers and other opportunities, and securing investments in communities’ long-term Tree Equity efforts. Investing in the right trees in the right places is central to the effort. American Forests’ Tree Equity Score tool, which provides neighborhood-by-neighborhood maps of trees, demographics and urban heat islands for 2,600 urban areas of the U.S., allows communities to do just that. Assigning neighborhoods a score from 0 to 100, the Tree Equity Score determines whether communities have enough trees to ensure the health, economic and climate benefits that trees provide. The lower the score, the greater the priority for tree planting.
American Forests’ comprehensive Tree Equity work focuses on developing and sharing tools and techniques, building careers and other opportunities, and securing investments in communities’ long-term Tree Equity efforts. Investing in the right trees in the right places is central to the effort. American Forests’ Tree Equity Score tool, which provides neighborhood-by-neighborhood maps of trees, demographics and urban heat islands for 2,600 urban areas of the U.S., allows communities to do just that. Assigning neighborhoods a score from 0 to 100, the Tree Equity Score determines whether communities have enough trees to ensure the health, economic and climate benefits that trees provide. The lower the score, the greater the priority for tree planting.
But, Tree Equity is about more than just tools, and it requires investment. That’s why American Forests advocated for an unprecedented allocation of $1.5 billion to urban and community forestry as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act — funding that will go to 300 cities and states to advance Tree Equity in communities with a history of disinvestment. American Forests received $50 million of this funding to provide grants directly to communities. In 2024, the Tree Equity Catalyst Fund invested in 39 cities to support their Tree Equity journey. Along with public finance, the private sector is also increasingly investing in collaborative funding to boost Tree Equity work.
Building on her positive heat mapping experience, Bass has recently turned her attention to trees as a solution. “We want to go out into the communities that lack a lot of trees and help plant them, which will possibly defeat the heat crisis,” she says.
Bass signed up her organization as an official tree ambassador with Chicago’s Our Roots program, a citywide Tree Equity initiative modeled on the broader movement American Forests helped create. The program directly involves community members in expanding urban tree canopy by providing training, resources and funding — all key tenets of Tree Equity.
Raed Mansour, the director of environmental innovation for the city’s Department of Public Health who co-leads Our Roots Chicago (along with Heat Watch), believes that in order to create meaningful change, the communities he works with must guide the process. He highlights the commitment of the expansive and diverse community Tree Equity working group as central.
“We don’t want to approach this as we’re doing this at you, or for you,” he says. “It should be we’re doing this with you.”
BRINGING EVERYONE TO THE TREE EQUITY TABLE
Just three years after 2021’s harrowing heat dome, Washington State made the bold decision to grow the Evergreen State’s tree canopy cover in an equitable way. To help make it happen, American Forests and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources launched the Washington State Tree Equity Collaborative, the largest statewide partnership to build a more inclusive urban forestry program.
With this as the foundation, Seattle, one of the first cities to join the collaborative, has made some major commitments, including the planting and maintaining of tens of thousands of trees over the next several years. And, by the end of this year, the city hopes to develop a Tree Canopy Equity and Resilience Plan for achieving Seattle’s tree canopy goals.

Photo Credit: David Boyd / Weyerhaeuser
Broader King County is also squarely focused on mitigating the impacts of extreme heat and in July 2024 released its first-ever strategy in collaboration with more than 900 participants, featuring expanding tree canopy as one major element. “The Extreme Heat Mitigation Strategy unifies a lot of work we’ve been doing for years to promote equitable access to welcoming green spaces where people and families can stay safe and cool during dangerous heat waves,” John Taylor, director for the county’s Department of Natural Resources, said at the time. “Now there is even greater urgency for us to protect and restore natural areas that provide healthy tree canopy in communities disproportionately impacted by climate change.”
It doesn’t necessarily take a statewide commitment to see immense impact. But, it does take bringing multiple parties to the table.
Back in Phoenix, nobody argues against the need for more shade. “It doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are, 120 degrees is 120 degrees. It’s too damn hot here,” Simon says, clarifying that the heat, of course, doesn’t affect everyone equally. That’s why it’s critical everyone is in alignment toward creating an equitable tree canopy in the nation’s hottest city.
That’s precisely what the Phoenix Metro Urban Forestry Roundtable set out to do when the coalition — a partnership between American Forests, the City of Phoenix and the Arizona Sustainability Alliance — formed in 2019. The Roundtable’s goal? To get dozens of partners together to improve Tree Equity in Maricopa County, and to address extreme heat along with it. Various Roundtable committees address everything from workforce development and business partnerships to tree species selection and nursery capacity, and it is in the process of finalizing a Tree Equity municipalities toolkit to make sure everyone continues moving along the same track.

Photo Credit: Rick D'Elia, D'Elia Photographic / American Forests
Phoenix aims to achieve Tree Equity by 2030 — the first city in the country to make such a pledge.
“For me, the idea of success is that I can walk away and all this still continues,” Simon says. “It’s about building up local organizations. It’s about getting everyone involved and moving in the right direction, because everyone agrees that this needs to be done.”
These efforts don’t just apply to big cities like Chicago, Phoenix and Seattle, but to smaller urban areas as well. Syracuse, N.Y., and Kalamazoo, Mich., for example, recently made commitments to growing their tree canopies equitably and received $1 million each from American Forests’ Catalyst Fund.
A critical component of Tree Equity on the ground is, of course, community involvement. But another important component is the inclusion of a broad range of stakeholders to advocate for it. American Forests’ Tree Equity Alliance, launched last summer, aims to do just that. “How do we bring the public health and the transportation people to the table, not just the typical urban forestry professionals, to talk about Tree Equity?” asks Alana Tucker, senior director of the Alliance. “Because it is a cross-sector, intersectional issue.”
Tucker highlights the significance of organizations like the American Heart Association, where advancing Tree Equity to help combat extreme heat would benefit cardiovascular health. In this way, the Alliance is aligning with new organizations that have shared visions and values in order to strengthen the Tree Equity message.
“We are using the momentum of the Inflation Reduction Act investment to say this can’t be it,” Tucker says of the Tree Equity Alliance. “We need sustained, flexible, permanent funding to make sure that the trees we’re planting in these neighborhoods are going to be maintained and cared for — and grow over time.”

Photo Credit: Lee Poston / American Forests
Trees, of course, are only one piece of a larger network of solutions to the intensifying heat — but they are a central piece worth fighting for. In May, American Forests joined several leading nonprofits in a Congressional briefing to highlight key pieces of legislation that would simultaneously accelerate action on Tree Equity and extreme heat, including a range of grant programs related to planting and maintaining trees, education and financial assistance.
“It’s not an issue that just affects traditionally hot places, or that we can only talk about from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It’s an issue that we’ve got to talk about 12 months a year,” Joel Pannell, American Forests’ vice president of urban forest policy, said during the briefing. “We need to continue to elevate this issue as a priority policy issue. We need to continue to elevate it as a kitchen table issue.”
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Remembering the plentiful orange and grapefruit trees of his youth, Smith sees Tree Equity as an opportunity to “reclaim” parts his city by bringing shade back to the Phoenix neighborhoods, and their residents, that need it most.
“A tree is a place where people can take a break and get their release. It’s a life-or-death situation for a lot of people,” Smith says. “I see the changes it’s making in my community, having these places to go.”
Nicole Greenfield is a New York-based freelance writer whose work focuses on the intersection of climate, environment and health.