Class News
URI gets glowing coverage in Hartford Courant
Our class began a relationship with the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (SFES) 20 years ago when classmate Gus Speth was appointed dean of the School. Currently our Class supports an SFES-sponsored program, Urban Resources Initiative (URI), which plants trees and gardens throughout the City of New Haven to promote beauty and civic pride. Chris Getman is organizing a pre-Reunion tour of URI projects from 9:00am to 11:00am on Thursday, May 30 for early arrivers. Read an article about the summer intern we sponsored in 2018 here.
Connecticut’s rapid loss of urban trees could have long-term consequences
Hartford Courant
April 11, 2019
Connecticut’s cities and towns are losing trees to disease, invasive pests, storm damage and old age at an alarming pace, and experts warn the loss of urban tree cover can impact everything from asthma rates to crime and property values.
In many financially hard-pressed municipalities, forestry funding is now going to taking down damaged and dying trees to protect public safety rather than planting trees to restore or maintain the “urban canopy.”
While the loss of tens of thousands of trees is an issue across the state, experts say the problems are worse in cities like Hartford than in leafier suburbs that have more trees to lose, or rural areas where forests can regenerate themselves.
“When you lose [tree] canopy, you lose all kinds of stuff,” says Jack Hale, Chair of Hartford Tree Advisory Commission, on the broad impacts of losing hundreds of city trees.
Connecticut has suffered an estimated 80,000 to 90,000 acres of “severe tree canopy loss” in the last few years, according to Tom Worthley, an associate professor with the UConn Extension Service. The causes include infestations of invasive insects like gypsy moths and the emerald ash borer, two years of drought, damage from multiple large storms, and trees that have reached the end of their natural life span.
Worthley said most of those dead or dying trees are in rural forests that will regenerate themselves over time, adding that the biggest concern he has is urban tree losses.
Repeated studies have shown that it’s the cities — and their poorer neighborhoods in particular — that need tree cover the most. Trees take particulate pollution out of the air and help reduce brutally high asthma rates in urban centers like Hartford and New Haven. Neighborhoods with tree-lined streets have lower crime rates and higher property values. Trees help cool urban “hot spots,” cutting residents’ air conditioning costs and reducing heat-wave health problems. Trees also help soak up and slow stormwater flooding.
Earlier this decade, Hartford was spending about $500,000 a year to plant an estimated 1,000 trees across the city annually. The city’s Climate Change Action Plan, adopted in 2017, called for increasing yearly tree plantings to 2,500 to combat global warming, reduce air pollution, provide cooling shade, and improve the livability and health of low-income neighborhoods.
But there has been virtually no city money available for the past two years to pay for planting trees, according to Hale.
“We’re not able to keep up with the rate of tree removal throughout the city,” said Clasina Jones, marketing director for KNOX Inc., a nonprofit group in Hartford that is using private contributions to a plant a limited number of trees and shrubs around the city. A program to plant trees requested by Hartford residents has been hamstrung by lack of city funding, and Jones said there is now a two-year-old waiting list of about 60 people who are seeking to get trees planted.
In New Haven, a nonprofit organization called Urban Resources Initiative, associated with Yale University, is planting about 500 trees a year using about $225,000 in 2018-19 city funding.
URI uses resources from both Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and city funding for a tree planting program involving Yale students, teens from local high schools, and former prison inmates who have difficulty finding work after serving their terms.
New Haven tree warden Rebecca Bombero said the city’s goal in recent years has been to plant “at least the same number of trees that were lost.” But she doubts New Haven can achieve that target this year because of heavy storm damage and the loss of hundreds of ash trees to the invasive emerald ash borer.
“We’re not going to be able to keep up with that amount of removals,” Bombero said.
“We really have to have deliberate planting programs,” URI’s director, Colleen Murphy-Dunning, said of the effort to compensate for all the trees being cut down because of public safety and power line concerns.
One recent morning, URI’s GreenSkills Manager Katie Beecham and her seven-member team were planting trees in New Haven’s Beaver Hills neighborhood. “We’re lucky to have a city that invests in this,” said Beecham. “We’re planting where people asked for them.”
When a New Haven resident asks for a tree to be planted, URI experts evaluate the location for pollution, traffic, amount of sunlight, and other factors that could hamper or help a tree’s growth, and then decide on the appropriate species to plant. On one street, Beecham’s team put in a red oak tree. A few blocks away, a black gum tree was planted in front of a house where the homeowner had lost a big oak during one of Connecticut’s recent major storms.
In Waterbury, tree warden Mark Lombardo said his city has used federal grants to plant about 50 trees within the last decade. But Lombardo added that the city’s efforts are “not even close” to replacing the hundreds of trees that have been lost during that period.
“It’s been tough,” Stephen Hladun, Bridgeport’s tree warden, said. “Storms have definitely impacted our area … and they seem to be coming more frequent, and the severity is pretty strong.”
Hladun estimated Bridgeport also lost hundreds of trees in the last few years and that the pace of replanting isn’t matching the numbers that have been cut down due to storm damage or invasive pests.
Urban forestry experts say most people don’t understand how important trees are to cities in so many ways. “If you have trees in a neighborhood, people feel better, crime goes down, property values go up,” Hale said.
A survey by the University of California of 31 urban sites in that state found that “Ninety percent of the incidents of vandalism or graffiti occurred in areas without plantings compared to 10 percent in landscaped areas.”
In Chicago, a study of public housing projects reported that residential buildings “with high levels of vegetation recorded 52 percent fewer total crimes, 48 percent fewer property crimes, and 56 percent fewer violent crimes than buildings with low levels of vegetation.”
“We have the same sort of evidence in New Haven,” Murphy-Dunning said. A 2015 analysis of crime and tree cover in New Haven found that a “10 percent increase in tree canopy was associated with a 15 percent decrease in violent crime” and a 14 percent drop in property crime.
Trees also help remove air polluting particulates, which contribute to extraordinarily high rates of asthma in low-income neighborhoods in cities like Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven. “The leaf surfaces capture particulates from the air,” explained Murphy-Dunning.
Connecticut’s asthma rates are significantly higher than the 8.3 percent national average, and the rates in low-income neighborhoods in New Haven and Hartford are far higher than the state average. One New Haven neighborhood was found to have an asthma rate more than double the national average.
Hartford’s Climate Change Action Plan estimated the city’s trees “remove 73 tons of major air pollutants each year,” including carbon monoxide and ozone. The plan’s authors also point out that Hartford’s trees take in and store an estimated 11,000 tons of carbon, a critical factor in helping to slow global warming.
Connecticut and its municipalities are also spending hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce stormwater overflows that pollute streams, rivers, and eventually Long Island Sound. Experts say trees can be a remarkably effective and cheap way to retain stormwater and slow its flow into sewage systems.
Right now, a $279-million tunnel, funded through taxpayer-financed grants and loans, is being dug under South Hartford to store stormwater overflows to prevent raw sewage from being flushed into the Connecticut River.
Hale says the MDC, the quasi-public agency responsible for Hartford’s sewer systems, should be spending a lot more money on planting trees to control flooding from what climate scientists predict will be more frequent and more intense major storms.
The shade from urban trees is also very effective in cooling city streets and buildings. Hartford’s climate change plan estimated that city residents save more than 3.8 million kilowatts in energy usage every year as a result of trees.
“We know that excessive heat is the primary weather-related cause of death in cities,” said Hale.
The sections of Hartford that have the fewest trees “tend to be in areas where people with low incomes live, go to school and work,” Hale said, adding municipal tree-planting efforts should be targeting those exact neighborhoods.
Chris Martin, head of the state’s forestry unit, said that state and federal funding for local tree-planting programs has been cut in recent years. He said private owners of woodlands in Connecticut do receive federal assistance through the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help restore forest property damaged by invasive pests.