A TREE PLAN FOR ALL CITIES

 

A TREE PLAN FOR ALL CITIES

Gil Penalosa is founder of 8 80 Cities Initiatives that advocates for public places to be more accessible.


He is pitching what he calls the 3-30-300 plan.

Based on reearch done by Cecil Konijinendijk, a professor of Urban Forestry at UBC

This plan ensures every resident has three things that can offer

 significant health and environmental benefits.

What the 3-30 -300 trees plan entail are -

  • at least 3 trees shoild be visible from your home

  • the tree canopy in every single neighbourhood in the City

  •  should cover 30 % of the land

  • a person should never be more than 300 nearest from the

  •  nearest public park or green space

This plan truly recognizes hoe vitally important trees are for the City.

In Toronto alone its 11.5 million trees -

  • store 1.1 million tonnes of carbon

  • soak up more than 330, 000 cubic metres of stormwater runoff

  • removes 972 tonnes of air pollution

  • oak, hickory and birch are great trees for helping to remove

  •  mercury, pesticides, lead, and cadmium from the air.

  • Eastern white cedars produce aerosols with antiviral 

  •  components that could help protect children in their young

  •  and vulnerable years.

  • trees planted along the lakeshore provide shade for all aquatic

  •  life who lay their eggs at the shoreline- too much heat from

  •  the sun will destroy the eggs of fish and other aquatic creatures

  • during photosynthesis trees suck up CO2, a nasty GHG, while

  •  providing us with oxygen

  • trees help reduce erosion problems during spring thaws

  • trees reduce the amount of lawn you have to maintain

  • In a report by Oakville (the first of its kind in Ontario) called

  •  Oakville’s Urban Forest: Our Solution to our Pollution it was

  •  pointed out that Oakville’s urban forest provided $ 2.1 million

  •  in ecological services annually.

  • the town’s 1.9 million trees soaked up 22, 000 tonnes of CO2 in 2005

  • it filtered all the town’s industrial and commercial emissions of coarse particulate matter

  • the replacement value of the urban trees was pegged at $878 million

  • residents and businesses saved $840, 000 on their energy bills

  • the 20-25 % on a trees biomass that occurs underground takes up 40-60% of annual carbon

  • a tree gives up 10-85 % of its sugars photosynthesized from

  •  CO2 to mycorrhizal fungi (attached to the end of tree roots) which in return pick up valuable mineral nutrient suchas phosphorous and nitrogen












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