Urban Forestry Resources

Critical Life Sustaining Systems

For many people, urban forests are the most powerful living systems that they are directly influenced by every day. From the relief provided by a tree’s shade in our increasingly extreme heatwaves to the (largely unrecognized) buffering trees provide during extreme weather events such as floods, urban trees are constantly, quietly providing our communities with critical life-support services. These living systems are also enormously vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

Below you will find links to both active and emergent urban forestry initiatives. These include both an overview of the growing national campaign to dramatically expand the scale of urban forestry efforts—both a community recovery and climate resilience action—and a specific case study of a regional urban forestry expansion initiative in the Denver Metro/Northern Colorado Front Range area. This case study includes an extensive description of an approach that focuses urban forestry benefits and workforce opportunities towards the most vulnerable and historically underserved people in our communities.

There are also resources here that chronicle the rapidly developing efforts around creating a market for ecosystems restoration and regeneration. This includes a unique Request for Proposals to purchase the first 40,000 metric tons of urban forest captured carbon; a proposal just submitted to capture 6,000 additional tons of atmospheric carbon into a northern Boulder County agroforestry project; and links to an exciting and important new framework for establishing transparent high standards for carbon offsetting—The Oxford Principles For Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting.

More resources will be added to this page as we have them.

Featured

Vanguard Cities Initiative

In 2020, a consortium of “vanguard” cities began collaborating around shared goals and knowledge about rapid implementation of high-impact urban forestry efforts in historically under-resourced communities and areas with high vulnerability to climate change impacts. Lead cities in this collaboration—Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Denver/Front Range, Portland, and Albuquerque—formalized their collaboration as the Urban Forestry Vanguard Cities Initiative and have since developed and refined large-scale urban forestry expansion strategies ready to utilize both federal and other leveraged resources.

Healing Our Environment and Our Communities: John Liu Talks Ecosystem Restoration at the Boulder Forum

John Liu planted a seed that blossomed into a movement. The documentary filmmaker, environmental educator and father of the Ecosystems Restoration Camps movement joined us for the fourth Boulder Forum on Economy, Climate and Community panel.

Front Range Urban Forestry Council Presentation

UDI Director Brett KenCairn provides a briefing on the emerging recognition of the critical role urban forestry will play in addressing climate change and an update on local, regional and national initiatives to significantly expand funding and action in urban forestry. He also provides a brief overview of the recently released “Front Range Urban Forestry Expansion Strategy” calling for a three-year, $100M investment in urban forestry across the Front Range.

Carbon Management Tool for Urban Lands

UDI, the Trust for Public Land, and other partners have built a new urban lands carbon management analysis and decision support tool that can analyze data to project where and how much carbon we can capture and what critical life support services—reducing extreme heat, absorbing stormwater, reducing air pollution—this carbon drawdown can achieve.

The Oxford Principles For Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting

As part of their climate strategies, many companies, organisations, cities, regions, and financial institutions are relying on voluntary carbon offsetting—payment to receive credit for a certified unit of emission reduction or removal carried out by another actor. Current best practice helps to reduce some of the well-known risks associated with existing offsets (e.g. improper carbon accounting, re-release of stored carbon, negative unintended impacts on humans or ecosystems, etc.), but is unlikely to deliver the types of offsetting needed to ultimately reach net zero emissions.

Urban Forestry Expansion Bibliography

UDI has compiled an extensive bibliography of close to 50 citations of both research and media coverage of urban forestry-related topics. This document includes links to the sources for each citation.

Colorado Front Range Urban Forestry Expansion Strategy - Full Report

With support from the J.M. Kaplan Fund, UDI spent six months working with close to 40 local organizations and jurisdictions in the Colorado Front Range/Denver-Metro area to formulate a detailed, equity-centered urban forestry scale-up strategy. This report provides extensive details on the strategies developed through this broad coalition including equity-based workforce development, community-centered engagement strategies, forestry project scoping and scaling, and an applied urban forestry research approach. This document is meant to be a resource and reference to other metro areas and regions around the country and an indication of the scale of funding and resources needed to achieve transformative urban forestry actions.

Urban Forestry Scale-Up Portfolio: Vanguard Cities

UDI worked with six cities with leading urban forestry programs—Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver-Metro and San Francisco—to formulate “shovel ready” rapid urban forestry scale-up strategies designed to support equity-based community recovery and accelerate protection and enhancement of critical “green infrastructure” essential to managing urban heat extremes and other impacts of extreme weather associated with a changing climate. The portfolio provides a framework for other cities to explore similar scale-up strategies.

Colorado Front Range Urban Forestry Expansion Strategy - Summary