Displaced by a booming economy that favoured the already wealthy, we moved from Dublin to Wicklow – “The Garden of Ireland” – when I was eleven years old. The house was tiny but the view was magnificent: a patchwork of rolling fields and forests greeting 15 kilometres of coastal wetlands and pebbled beach.
The passage of time, the slow but inexorable tick tock of development, was marked by the gradual encroachment of new housing estates on that green expanse. It was only perhaps a year or two after we had moved there that we began to tell visitors “it used to be all green out there”. Visiting last month after a long absence, I found the transformation complete. Every green inch of those hills is now concrete.
It is hard not to hear the word progress and think of this form of slow suffocation, of land bought up, stripped down and built up, to feed the all-consuming Moloch we tend to call “the economy”. From a certain perspective, progress is measured by every tree that’s cut down, and yet progress – scientific or otherwise – is also measured by our growing awareness of the climate and our place in it. Indeed, a cursory trawl for recent articles on trees shows how important they are to the present and future development of Europe’s urban as well as rural landscapes.
Reading between the lines of Bartira Augelli‘s article in the Dublin Inquirer reveals how the relative leafiness of a neighborhood can tell us about the income bracket of its inhabitants. Looking at the Dublin Tree Map initiative, which maps all the trees in Dublin “to identify and assess the city’s urban forest” and “identify where deficits might be”, Augelli compares and contrasts a number of neighborhoods in the city. The decidedly posh Donnybrook, Ballsbridge and Rathmines have “very high” tree-density, while tree-density is “low” in the historically working class Crumlin. The distribution of trees in Dublin is “uneven”, and also unequal. Another relevant data point here, highlighted in Augelli’s article, is the fact that only one third of Dublin’s 300,000 trees are public.
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Augelli talked to researchers from University College Dublin who are working on the INTERVAL project, which aims to “minimise environmental injustice by addressing the unequal distribution of urban street trees through community-driven scientific research.” As one of the researchers tells Augelli, getting to know the local communities is essential, and often mutually educational: “Engaging with communities will help them to understand how many trees they have around them, where more could be added, and how they benefit a wider ecosystem.” This conversation extends to “community members, public bodies, environmental NGOs, and a bunch of others”, and they have also reached out to “sports clubs, schools, senior and youth groups, the Scouts, and religious groups.”
Starting with a pilot project in Crumlin, the researchers will work with the local community to create a database and map that can properly address and communicate the environmental benefits of specific trees. “Data […] can be used to calculate how much carbon the trees sequester, the oxygen they release, the stormwater they can soak up – and how they filter pollutants from the air, and moderate hot weather.” With such information, the community can “spot where more green infrastructure is needed” and act – or campaign – accordingly.
As the work of the UCD researchers suggests, it is not just the quantity of trees that matters, but also the variety. Henrik Sjöman, a scientific curator at Gothenburg’s botanical garden, tells Swedish technology magazine Ny Teknik that the varieties of trees that should be planted in Swedish cities have to change with the climate. A warming climate means that cities need trees that can survive more heat and more drought. Moreover, cities present specific challenges: “the big buildings retain heat like hot rocks. It can be several degrees warmer inside the city than outside.”
For this reason, Sjöman is testing trees from other countries (Romania, for example) and collecting data. This data collection is important for two reasons. The first and perhaps most obvious reason is precautionary: foreign species have been known to spread like weeds and become invasive. The second reason is due to the limitations of current knowledge: “today, the entire industry is based on guesswork. It is believed that ‘this one is probably drought-resistant’. But we need to know exactly how drought resistant, or how sensitive it is.” Sjöman also complains of “resistance” among politicians and authorities to the idea of planting foreign species, which the scientist blames on ignorance.
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In the Swedish conservative daily Smålandsposten, Thomas Hermansson points out that despite authorities’ enthusiasm for tree-planting projects, “interest seems to be cooler when it comes to urban trees. Which is strange […]. According to a Sifo survey a few years ago, almost all Swedes think that it is important to have trees in the cities.” For Hermansson, the case for more urban trees could not be more obvious: they improve air quality, they improve biodiversity by providing a habitat for animals and insects, they make cities more resilient against flooding, and they even help lower the local air temperature and prevent cities becoming “heat islands”. Moreover, when it comes to the inequalities mentioned earlier, Hermansson points to research suggesting a correlation between low tree-density and high crime.
Outside the cities, a recent series of articles in Reporterre, “The Fruits of the Future“, highlights how climate change is affecting the kinds of fruit and nut trees that are being planted across France. Fabienne Loiseau examines the case of one farmer near Paris who is taking advantage of the longer, hotter summers to plant American pecan trees; Laury-Anne Cholez writes of the first farmers to farm bananas in mainland France; and Marie Astier looks at the increasing popularity of the Mediterranean pistachio tree among French food producers, not least due to the tree’s resilience to drought.