The City of Somerville took a step towards combating climate change and fighting environmental injustice yesterday with the release of its first ever Urban Forest Management Plan. The plan aims to grow coverage and improve tree health in the city, helping the environment and increasing equitable access to shade and green space.
Over 350 pages, the document, which took over two years to create, will guide the future of Somerville’s urban forest, which includes all the trees within a given municipality.
“Trees are a very lovely idea that everybody grabs on to, but they actually need to be maintained,” said Luisa Oliveira, Somerville’s Director of Public Space and Urban Forestry. “Planting trees without a concrete solid plan for maintaining and for thinking about climate change and species selection is foolish.”
A range of offices in the City of Somerville collaborated with community partners to draft the plan, which was funded by a grant from the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation and the USDA Forest Service. Funding for planting and maintenance going forward would come from taxpayer dollars voted by the city council, or from grants.
Oliveira called the report “a framework for the city to look at trees as infrastructure.”
“They provide so many important benefits, even more so with climate change,” she said.
In addition to creating a plan for maintaining existing trees, the report mapped existing tree canopy coverage to figure out what areas of the city deserve more attention. Like many other parts of the country, the city found disparities in canopy coverage based on socioeconomic class.
“We did see lower canopy cover in some of our areas that have lower income and more racial diversity,” said Dr. Vanessa Boukili, a Senior Urban Forestry and Landscape Planner with the City of Somerville. “So that does give us good impetus for increasing planting in those areas.”
The low-coverage areas include Winter Hill and the Mystic Parkway area.
“A lot of places that were formerly industrial ... a lot of places in Somerville that have been historically impoverished,” said Tori Antonino, an Urban Forestry Committee member and co-founder of Green & Open Somerville, an organization that works to improve green space. “There’s still that remnant of places that have been ignored.”
A high number of trees is linked with higher property values, Boukili said, and trees are a vital part of urban communities because they reduce urban heat, reduce energy costs, filter air and water and create a central habitat for wildlife.
Because of this, Boukili said the city plans to up its planting goals from 300 to 350 trees per year, hoping to increase its canopy coverage from 14.6% to 16% and increase planting of indigenous species.
Antonino hopes the plan will create a model for other cities to follow.
“I just feel like Somerville is making a lot of progress from just five years ago,” she said. “Our trees made a lot of work, because we have so much pavement ... but I feel hopeful.”
