Assistant Professor University of Virginia, United States
Large scale tree planting initiatives have emerged as promising strategies to address various environmental, climate and societal concerns in different cities. However, the uneven distribution of tree cover along with the ecosystem services as well as human health and well-being benefits it provides has environmental justice and equity implications if disadvantaged socio-demographic or socio-economic and marginalized communities lack these services and benefits. Although several cities are implementing initiatives that seek to reduce existing inequities by targeting disadvantaged communities with extremely low tree cover, decisions about where to implement these tree plantings are complex and often fail to incorporate community voices as well as historical and other social factors that shape these distributions. Resolving the challenge of urban green space inequities requires a deeper understanding of the procedural and contextual issues that create these unjust distributions. Here we examine large scale tree planting initiatives in different cities of the United States to not only map distributions of current tree cover along with estimated services, benefits and costs that accrue to communities by socio-economic status and vulnerability but to understand how factors such as the local environment, development histories, stakeholder preferences and local governance influence these distributions and future green infrastructure investments in cities. While local environmental conditions are at play, we show how unique historical and social contexts help explain the environmental justice and equity concerns related to tree cover distributions observed in cities as well as how the services, benefits and costs from urban green spaces accrue to different communities. For example, in all the cities we explored, we illustrate how policies, standards, and historical development patterns shape the proportion of available planting space, affecting the optimization of tree planting sites for future initiatives and their ability to serve the needs of underserved communities.
