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












Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DON'T TREAT MOTHER EARTH LIKE A GIGANTIC GARBAGE BIN

 DON'T  TREAT MOTHER EARTH LIKE A GIGANTIC GARBAGE BIN On Sunday, October 15, the Barrie Garden Club ventured out on a dark, dreary, and drizzly day to pick up litter, along Highway 26 close to Wilson Avenue. As I was picking up all kinds of litter such as license plates, chairs, discarded clothing, plastic bags, lots  of cigarette butts, and a myriad of discarded coffee containers, I began to reflect on all the problems triggered by litter. Here in Canada, we are very lucky to have an organized system where most municipalities and cities  make sure that there are regular pick-ups for your garbage, compost, and recyclables. So it boggles my mind why so many Canadians do not use the readily provided containers, but instead  treat Mother Earth like a gigantic garbage bin. I simply cannot understand when someone buys a cup of coffee, they then go for a long hike, they  manage to carry the cup full of coffee, but the minute it’s empty, they simply cannot manage to carry  it back home a
Read more

What do you think? Can birds help combat the catastrophic impacts of climate chaos?

Image
  What do you think? Can birds help combat the catastrophic impacts of  climate chaos ? YES! YES! A THOUSAND TIMES YES! Birds do an incredible job of  helping to create new forests by eating tons of tree seeds.  As they fly all over the forests the tree seeds in their poop is dropped on the forest  floor.  And, the poop helps to fertilize the tree seeds as they sprout into saplings. 92% of woody plants are grown from the seeds dropped by birds in their poop !  182 species are edible. 85 species are used for timber.  153 species are medicinal  plants. 156 species are ornamental.  A new study   published  in Forest Ecosystems   (20220 concluded large fruit-eating animals, including birds like toucans significantly help regenerate forests which are  giant traps for carbon, collectively, absorbing  as much as 30 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions , and store more than 1,600 gigatonnes of carbon in their soil.  In the tropics, tall, hardwood species with dense,
Read more