Submitted by MistWeaver80 t3_10qm1jv in science
They make such a huge difference. I’m in Minneapolis and aside from the most urban areas, we have nice large trees everywhere except for the new developments.
I hate seeing new developments where they just completely destroy the landscape and then plant stupid little trees that only grow to 10-15’ high.
Glad someone beat me to a Twin Cities comment! Grew up in rural Wisconsin, didn't see myself in a city.
But i am not minding St Paul. I ride my motorcycle past 3 lakes and half under tree cover on my 10 minute commute. Every section of developed space is broken up by trees and/or lakes. Its quite lovely, despite the population density.
It really is. I’m in a first ring suburb and you can barely see my house on google earth because of the tree cover.
I spent 2 years in Seoul after living in rural northern WI and the UP. I missed the trees, clean water, and open spaces so much.
I really enjoyed my time in MN. Cool state.
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They have to have small trees so when they fall they don't smash the house.
green roofs are a good way forward too. We could go full on r/fuckcars but in the US or Canada, it might as well be asking for a miracle.
Eh, green roofs are usually realllllly heavy and require much bigger foundations. Better to limit building to tree-canopy height and get the vegetation benefits from overhang canopy.
Yeah the whole point of a roof is to keep the elements away from the house. Adding tons of soils and vegetation and watering it everyday is just asking for trouble, specially if you cheaped out on the installation.
Most green roofs don't require tons of soil and watering vegetation. They're usually pretty thin layers of media and root barriers for grasses and other native plants to live, they're called extensive green roofs.
Intensive green roofs usually don't cover the whole thing, and have deeper layers and larger plants. They're much less common.
The intensive ones are awesome to see, but not practical. Thd extensive ones won't have near the impact on local temperature of trees.
It might not be better than painting all the roofs white for heat but they'd still do better than shingles or solar panels. A combination of that for the roofs and trees, especially native where possible, would not just impact local temps but also fauna.
True, birds and bugs would absolutely love it.
I hate going up on to my roof too. So many things could go wrong with a setup like that. Screw that noise. I want a low maintenance roof.
Limiting buildings to tree canopy height cements the housing crisis. We need high density housing.
It's a bad situation to be in. Every where you look there's pain.
We really should't get too hand up on this. Street trees apply almost anywhere. And green roofs are fine but just the trees outside to cover the asphalt is already a massive improvement. Trees and some green roofs where possible is totally doable and a massive improvement. Looking for a perfect solution is a great way to do nothing
There’s way more untapped vertical space in single-family neighborhoods in desirable cities even below five stories than there is housing demand. NYC might be the one exception but even there the surrounding suburbs have a lot of potential. We need high-density housing but we really don’t need buildings above 80 feet tall to achieve it except maybe in NYC.
The climate benefits of building height max out between 5-10 stories anyway.
Urban sprawl is HORRIBLE for climate.
Suburbs are a major problem
Of course. But you could immediately halt all exurban development and also provide plenty housing to ease the housing shortage if we just upzone inner-ring suburbs to medium-sized multifamily buildings.
building up is more expensive, plus people kinda want their own 4 walls.
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Cars will never go away in places where everything is far apart. Mass transit can be great for cities, but becomes less practical outside them.
Cities should be denser
Sure. That doesn't solve the issue that so many people live outside cities. Even if you pretend they don't exist, their carbon emissions (including their cars) won't disappear.
It solves the problem that people in cities have too-high emissions because our infrastructure has made them reliant on cars.
“Your proposal won’t fix anything, so we shouldn’t do it” is the argument on the side that doesn’t have arguments that are actually good.
You are not actually arguing against what I said though. But if that's what you want to do, go ahead and reply to my comment however you please. You aren't even alone in that.
it wasnt a real proposition because it will never happen.
It's a problem in that some people imagine this is a real solution. I'm afraid we need real solutions to real problems, and Climate Change is a very real, very serious problem.
The problem with green roofs is cost and potential failure. It's actually very difficult to seal them, and when a leak does show up, it's difficult to fix. Trees tend to also be absolutely excellent at breaking through even concrete, so planting trees on roofs is asking for a problem.
Green medians can be a much more cost effective way to green up a city. Small rooftop gardens with potted plants or shallow beds with shallow rooted plants could help.
I would love to see 80' tall sycamores and maples on top of skyscrapers, but i don't think it's practical.
> Green medians can be a much more cost effective way to green up a city.
ah yes, patches of grass. the worst possible greening you can do.
That's not what I'm referring to. Trees and brush in the median. Think Tuscon AZ, not Beverly Hills.
Can't even get home owners to take care of benefitial green spaces on the ground, they aren't going to be able to do it on their roofs.
Yeah it's probably not realistic without an unimaginably robust nation-wide public transit system
I think we should start moving underground, not totally but enough to free up space for the earth to grow.
I like windows, so please no.
I promise you that Linux is a fine alternative.
Yeah! Emulated windows are just as good as the real thing!
Wine is not an emulator.
Nice thread 10/10
But drink enough of it and you can forget about not having windows!
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i think it would be fine for industry and workplaces where you barely see sunlight anyway, but for mental health reasons building housing underground is a terrible idea yeah
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It's always worth pointing out that 80% of humanities land use is purely for growing food for, and rearing, livestock. This only produces about 20% of humanities food.
There's plenty of room for people :) it's the 60 billion odd animals (especially the cows and other mammals!) that are the problem.
If people treated red meat and dairy like a luxury, (say, reduced consumption to once every two weeks) it would more than half humanities land use! It would also be cheaper, and better for their health so they'd live longer with a higher quality of love.
I think you misspoke, "purely for growing food and rearing livestock" includes both growing human food and livestock feed when I think you only meant growing livestock feed.
You are correct, I meant to say growing food for livestock and rearing livestock. Basically, 80% of land is to make meat and dairy and it only produces 20% of our food. The other 20% of our land use is for plants, and that produces 80% of our food.
All other human land use is about 1% of habitable land - a rounding error compared to farming
I think you're making an error in the implied assumption that the aforementioned land is all equal. It isn't. For example, there's a county of roughly 10000 square miles in southeastern oregon that has arouns 7000 people in it. It's got a little bit of protected area, but the VAST majority of it is cattle rangeland interspersed with hay/alfalfa fields. There's occasionally other crops, but not much. There's a lot of meat coming out of that country, but it's not dense. Every cow needs a massive amount of space to graze enough to slaughter, but that's because there's just not much out there. There's not enough water to sustainably grow food crops, but a cow can wander a few miles a day munching on bunch grasses and be fat and happy.
Additionally, a lot of rangeland is far closer to wild than farmland. Cattle are grazed on huge swaths of BLM land in the western US, that is essentially just wild land. To convert even 20% of that to any other use would be a massive ecological disaster. And the cows do some damage, too, but nothing like clearing forest and planting crops.
This use would DRASTICALLY affect any such statistics like the one you're quoting. Meat production on factory farms fed by monoculture feed crop field have their own problems, but they are far more space efficient than the story your numbers paint.
I think you are making the mistake of taking one biome that has cows in and which cows aren't the worst option, and assuming all biomes are like that. What percentage of the world's agricultural land is what you describe?
I'm talking about things like deforested tropical and temperate forest/rainforest. Like, the Amazon isn't being cleared just for kicks. England isn't kept as rolling green fields just for the postcards (and has a similar thing to the US cattle with sheep, which are relatively self sustaining and low impact suited to a lot of the UKs more rugged areas, like for cows how you describe).
I'd agree that animals raised in ways like that aren't the worst. But there's 1.5billion cows in the world and most of them are gorged on high calorie food grown on fertilised fields that would have been - if not for human intervention - something completely different.
(Plus, if you want to live off food like that, you basically have to become a vegan on steroids with how rigourously you study ingredients. Vegans can just look at a packet of chips and be like "damn, it's got milk in, guess I'll get a different brand". People who only want to eat meat from natural farming processes have to either reach the same conclusion, or go on a lengthy research journey to try and figure out if Lays use milk they find acceptable - which inevitably they don't. Sorry for the tangent!)
I'm not making that mistake at all. I'll pointing out that a huge percent of the Western US is considered "used for cows", even though there's only a few cows per square mile, and the cow's use of that land is pretty low impact.
If you lump that in with factory farms where even considering the area required for feed, you're getting multiple cows per acre, you end up with a drastically skewed statistic where the average land use per cow is very different from the median land use per cow.
And since the vast majority of our meat comes from factory farms (I'm seeing 99%, but that's not just beef), the median land use is far more important. So, if you include the few hundred thousand square miles of rangeland with barely any cows on it, you think every cow we don't raise frees up like 4.6 acres that can go towards something else. But in reality, if we don't raise one median cow it only frees up a couple hundred square feet.
Do you see how the statistic is skewed? I've been around feed lots and live in agricultural areas. I see feed crops. I also live near rangeland. A simple statistic of "percentage of human land use" doesn't really tell any of that story with any degree of accuracy.
I mean, we're from completely different parts of the world so I get we are coming from different view points. But the key factor I'm considering is that cows need a certain amount of calories. Those calories either come from low density area (like you describe) or high density crop.
I guess I should have said how much of the world's beef comes from low density crop lands in the USA?
And another thing I'd wonder about, do those cattle live entirely off the land? In the UK we have "grass fed" cows, which are premium and reared entirely off the land, but they require huge amounts of land in order to have enough food available to them, plus higher calory supplements to actually put on weight. So unless you actually know a small hold farmer, in Europe, any meat/dairy you get is from "unnatural" means, with cows being reared more intensively than the land would allow. That intensity comes from other land, elsewhere, being used as well. I know the same applies in Australia and much of South Africa, but I can't comment on the Western US.
And, to be fair, I haven't focused on land use exclucively. My point was that we are actively destroying many biomes in order to produce food for livestock. If we stopped eating as much meat and dairy (reduce it to the recommended amounts medically, in the US and Europe) that would take off a huge amount of pressure from biomes we are destroying.
To go back to my original point, if people treated meat and dairy like a luxury, that would probably just leave cows in the habitats you describe (although that's just a wild guess)
If you're coming from europe, i can understand how it's hard to wrap your head around the type of land in the western US, because there's isn't really the same type of thing anywhere in Europe to my knowledge.
Just the Bureau of Land Management handles around the area of one tenth of all of Europe (around 1 million km²). That's public land, no one lives on it. Almost all of it is used as grazing land to some extent. It's not really used otherwise except for recreation. That doesn't include national parks and national forests which are also commonly grazed in part. It doesn't include huge ranches that aren't factory farms. It doesn't include small farms and landowners that rent out fallow fields to cattle ranchers.
And the yield of that land is extremely variable. My 3.4 acres are listed among the highest potential yield crop land I've seen at well over 100 bushels per acre of most common crops. 10 miles north of me there's rolling hills of pasture land that probably could yield 25-40 bushels per acre if you could farm it. 100 miles southwest of me, your crops are probably just going to fail, but cows can scratch together enough food to gain weight for 11 months of the year.
So, factory farms put feed lots on land like that to the southwest of me and then buy feed from my neighbors here in the extremely fertile area. They can actually have 100 cows per acre. The ranchers to the north of me are probably running 1 cow per acre. Any ranchers to the southwest doing grazing are probably more like 5 acres per cow.
The factory farm needs crop land, and i can't find the actual calories per acre for just grass hay, but wheat is significantly more calorically dense and that's around 6.4 million Calories per acre. Corn is 12+ million, and that's for human consumption, but cows eat the stalks, too. So, i think a reasonable estimate would say a feed crop produces perhaps 3x the calories per acre of grassland on the low end and upwards of 10x at the top end.
So, ranching cows on pretty decent grassland is 1 acre per cow. Factory farming requires 0.11-0.31 acres per cow (0.1-0.3 acres for feed, 0.01 acres for pen space, plus a tiny bit for waste control). And the worse the land yield is the more acres you need. Factory farms exist for a reason: they're cheap and efficient.
But ALL that land is weighted the same in your narrative. It isn't the same at all. Factory farms and cropland is essentially worthless to wild animals. Rangeland is some animals primary habitat.
Monoculture crops can actually be much more damaging to the environment than rangeland raised meat, even when you account for the area required per calorie.
Oh, and as for your tangent, it's easier to know what you're eating if you can get a ways out of the city. Most of our eggs come from our chickens, we can easily get beef and pork from people that we know and can go see the animals in the fields. Hell, i can get the ear tag of the cow i put in my freezer if i want.
I think this is very country dependant :) I live in the countryside of Nottinghamshire in the UK, and UK countryside is very different from US countriside!
More crowded, for a start!
Without a doubt, but if you know a danger, you can probably buy a part of a cow.
80% seems high.
It is high! I was surprised too!
Do you want mole people? Because this is how you get mole people.
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A few years back, my family and I visited an amusement park that had a ton of trees around providing shade. The day itself was in the 90s, but it felt perfectly comfortable in the park. Widespread shade is no joke.
Yeah but can trees also provide food and medicine, manage stormwater runoff, create beautiful flowers, and provide habitat for native fauna?
Oh.
OHHHHHH
Oh and what about enriching soils by fixing nitrogen and stabilizing soil erosion from water and air like providing wind cover for crops? Surely they can't do that.
Yeah there’s just no way
I moved to a house with a green square for a backyard back in 2014.
It now has a 14 year old birch, a 2yr tulip tree, another 5yr tulip tree and a 7 year red oak tree.
All are native to the area and they started casting enough shade this summer, that my kids could actively play without being burned by the sun.
I'm the only neighbor for 100M who has native trees and most everyone else plants Norway maples which are good, fast growing trees though a little too big for my liking..
I will most likely be dead and buried by the time the oak and tulip trees canopy at over 50ft high and should shade most of the yard without being too low to kill the grass.
I also have been seeding my lawn with an eco friendly variety of grasses and white flower clover
We also naturalized the yard with native shrubbery as people forget that trees are good but shrubs and bushes help for things like soil saturation and animal/insect habitat
It takes a community for this sort of thing so I try and encourage people to do similar with their properties.
I call then butterfly alleys because they attract butterfly
The other great aspect is if you have your tree aligned to provide shade for your windows during the hottest part of the day, it massively cuts down on the amount of heat getting into your home. This reduces the need for active cooling and makes getting to sleep at night far easier and more comfortable.
Sounds like a dream yard
The home we had before had some issues but the property was surrounded in 50yr old trees+ and it canopied our yard.
We moved here and basically have been trying to add a small forest back in our yard
We also need policy to allow urban forestry to sustain, money tends to ruin these kind of movements.
Sounds like y’all need more r/solarpunk in your lives
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I'm going to suggest vines.
Deciduous vines can be trained, pruned and intertwined to cover a roadway entirely with a lower footprint than a tree. Presumably there are vines that can reach at least 6m high.
We need more trees, but more importantly, we need more trees that are both suited to their environment and are diverse too, which should help withstand blights a bit better too.
Almond trees! They get a bad rap because of the farming practices and water concerns in California, but with sufficient ground cover and bee friendly practice most of that goes away. The discussion about 3 gallons per almond or whatever do not account for the chemical reactions those three gallons participate over the 2-3 decade life of the tree. They are amazing at pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, if that's your gig. They can also utilize and filter water unsuitable for other purposes.
Almonds are very nutritious, provide an alternative to dairy, and the wood can be used for efficient cooking and heating in an emergency. The wood can also be used for cabinetry and furniture further sequestering CO2, and because they are farmed it is already renewable.
The leaves can be extracted and used in aquariums, hatcheries, and other fishy locations as an anti-fungal, darkening agent, and food source which distinctly benefits filter feeders like shrimp.
I would love a chance to not hate almond trees in California. Is there something to the way they are farmed that are negative or is it just misinformation?
Farming in general in California uses a lot of water, which is bad because there are also a lot of people in California. If Cali was just farmers it would t be a problem, but it is trying to balance the water needs of everyone that makes it an issue.
That's an asinine take. 40% of water use in California is agricultural and only 10% is urban (both indoor and outdoor). The other half of water use is environmental.
Water rights and water use incentives in agriculture are awful.
Loose almonds and kids with nut allergies. The city would have a hell of a law suit should a kid die from an almond they got from the park. Plenty of other non-nut bearing trees to use.
There certainly are people allergic to almonds, but people are allergic to all kinds of things. (and by the way, a lot of people allergic to nuts are not actually allergic to almonds) Other things have poisonous berries, for example. And they grow all round. Here in the Netherlands, people love using poison ivy as a fence, I swear the thing is *everywhere*, it can grow anywhere and survives everything. A lot of people are allergic to even touching it, and the berries are absolutely deadly. But like I said, it is completely everywhere and it does not seem to be a problem... Not sure why almonds would be any worse tbh.
Koch bros are right on the trees
Developers should not be allowed to remove all trees from a site.
It's a good thing in my area they keep trees and are otherwise considerate but I do want more and more green space conserved and even expanded upon.
There is a neat thing in Germany. If a tree got old enough, you are no longer allowed to cut it down unless it's weakened in some way and thus poses a threat to the people living there. Cutting a healthy tree down after a certain age can result in hefty fines up to 50.000€.
In my corner of the US, you can have the city arborist classify a tree as a "heritage tree," which protects it from removal. It needs to meet certain requirements, like being old, iconic, and/or rare, but it's an option if you really feel passionate about it.
It's not nearly the same as the German policy, but it's probably fairly common throughout the US.
Close enough! I think we don't need an arborist for that here, but besides that it feels like the same concept. I'm happy there is something similar at the other side of the pond.
yeah i doubt that, they're removing large areas of trees on a regular basis here. usually these kind of ridiculous laws only apply to private persons, not corporations
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We have a lot of trees where I live (large European city). But due to drought conditions that started in 2018 and have not let up since, more and more trees die every summer. Unfortunately it’s not just about planting trees— it’s about planting the right, more drought resistant trees that our hotter future necessitates.
Indeed. Our new normal temperatures will reflect this.
And keeping them alive. I’ve killed every tree I’ve ever planted. All were supposedly suitable for my region.
A common issue that I see discussed on /r/marijuanaenthusiasts/ is planting trees too deeply. Once a tree has sprouted it permanently establishes the division point between "root" and "trunk" and produces a different sort of bark on each. If a tree gets replanted deeper than it sprouted it ends up with soil against trunk-bark, which is more prone to rotting.
One ironic addition to this is another common issue is people often don't dig a big enough hole. They dig a small hole and put the tree as deep in it as they can. In truth, you want a big hole that can allow the roots to spread out the same way they naturally grow, but still have the boundary of the root/tree at the surface of the ground.
My parents, who have planted enough trees on their 40 acres, that it has affected their microclimate significantly, say if you buy a $10 sapling, dig a $100 hole. It needs to be both deep and wide. And if you have hardpan, you need to break through it.
Did you water them?
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I will add do deep drenches infrequently to encourage healthy root growth
Did you let them get established before letting them handle extreme weather? It's wise to protect and sorta baby younger/less mature plants/trees and give them a bit more attention. Generally the older a tree is, the more it can stand certain things like freezing temps and such.
That’s the problem. Summer drought and heat got some of them, freeze got the rest; despite my best efforts to water deep every other day in the summer (we’ll drained caliche soil) and protect from freeze. I’m expecting to lose some very nice big oaks in this ice-pocalypse. The biggest has lost about half its branches already. It’s heart breaking.
trees are DONE with our bs. they waiting for humans to die off before growing again.
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Do urban centers in Europe have room to add 30% more tree cover?
All they need to do is remove the parking spots and there will be plenty of space for trees.
I don't know about other EU urban centers but I feel this can be done with better street and square planning.
Narrowing roads so avenues/thoroughfares can be lined with trees, or better yet, move the avenues underground so the roof can be used for green public space. Using more green when renovating public squares. Moving (more) parking spaces underground.
My old home city of Antwerp recently renovated a bunch of public squares and instead of using the opportunity to reintroduce a lot of green, many of the squares are grey tiled or concrete wastelands that act like a blinding open grill in summer, with just a couple of new growth trees for show. A recent large new "park" is not much more than a giant grassland and concession stands with half a dozen trees, not much shade to be found.
Asking the real question here.
In most European cities, if you could free up 30% of space you should probably use most of it for housing.
This would also avoid people commuting from far away, thus saving a ton of energy and CO2 emissions. The CO2 captured by a 20-year tree through its growth is probably emitted in a few months max by a single suburban car commuter.
The title has to include axe?
My American brain expecting trees to save lives by making it harder to shoot people.
Well, you technically would have more cover to dodge those bullets from the cops and random civilians with ar-15s
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Tell your federal representatives to reintroduce the TREES Act. This bill directs the Department of Energy (DOE) to establish a grant program for states, local governments, Indian tribes, and other entities to facilitate tree planting projects that reduce residential energy consumption. Under the program, DOE must award grants to facilitate the planting of at least 300,000 trees annually in residential neighborhoods.
99% Invisible had an episode about this a few years ago. Definitely an interesting read/listen on the topic
When talking about heat deaths wouldn't it be more relevant to talk about how much tree coverage changes the peak temperatures? The average temperature is irrelevant because people aren't dying from being at 21.4 C rather than 21 C on average.
I agree. While the average is important, the minute difference downplays how people actually die. In fact, a climate with wild variation in temperature could have the same average as another with very stable temperature, however one would be much more dangerous
Say it with me, grasslands! We need grasslands as much as trees
Yeah a lot of native plant life is just gone and barley present due to our current practices
Crazy to me that as little as 0.4C can make such a big difference.
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Places used to be like this. Why do you think you see so many “Oak st” and “Cedar Ln?” Funny how science and innovation can lead right back where we started
And then you have the street I live on that was recently renamed to a species of tree that’s not found in the area I live in. There’s lots of oaks on my street, but not the specific species they renamed the street to. Also if you’re wondering, my street was originally named after a confederate general who had surrendered nearby. I wish I had gotten to vote on the new name.
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By a third in 30 years. Those things take time to grow.
Does that even make sense to anyone?
Wow that interchange looks str8 out of cities: skyline.
Beautiful…
Does anyone know what city this is in the title image?
It's difficult for me to plant more trees when I don't want to block solar panels (espalier ftw!)
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Please tell me this hasn’t been ‘recently discovered’
As a letter carrier I second and third this advice!
for most municipalities, it's not the cost of trees, it's maintenence
Personally I think this is purely a "works on paper but not in practice" scenario.
The issue is that the intersection of "people who live in greener neighborhoods" and "people who cant afford air conditioning" is very very very slim.
What will happen is as you go and plant more trees, shortly after property values in that area will shoot up and make it less affordable.
So the only people who benefit in the long run are those who were already well off in the first place, resulting in the lower classes (the group most heavily affected by heat waves) not gaining any of this benefit at all.
The upper class will just further cement their upper class'ness, and you'll just have the nicer neighborhoods becoming even more nicer, and the medium neighborhoods becoming gentrified and elevating to nice neighborhoods.
People don’t care to do things that don’t drive profit anymore
Cities should be designed around public transport and significant green spaces, instead we went the very opposite direction - urban sprawl with new suburbs that have almost no green space baring very small grassy parks
Trees are good. Damage to the environment in the name of corporate greed is bad.
Mmmmmmmkay
Yes please! Cities are way better with shade. Yards are way better with shade. Pools are way better with shade.
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And yet... In my current city they are paving every available surface into parking lots.
It will affect the quality of life for decades to come, but as of now people don't even begin to understand the issue, because they have no concept of a pleasant, livable city.
Industrial Hemp is a better idea. Grows faster, is a natural carbon filter, and it can be used to transition to the new green tech industry that is finding all kinds of useful ways to make stuff with hemp. Grow trees too in urban areas but grow hemp elsewhere.
1/3 is pretty terrible.
How many excess heat deaths do air conditioners prevent?
Wouldn't a focus on renewable energy for air conditioning be more efficient and save more lives?
Admittedly air conditioning is worthless to the homeless population whereas trees benefit them. But that's another problem I think we need to actually address, getting people homes.
Edit:
it actually looks like air conditioning has barely superior performance when it comes to preventing heat deaths (35% rather than 33%) but this global figure is mostly caused by people not having access to air conditioning:
> This pattern holds true globally. A major 2021 research report in the Lancet estimated that, globally, access to air conditioning averted 195,000 heat-related deaths among people ages 65 and older in 2019
> The authors estimate that 1.7 million deaths globally in 2019 were linked to extreme heat or cold. Of those, 356,000 deaths were due to heat...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01787-6/fulltext#seccestitle280
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/shade/
Check out this investigative podcast for some insight on the idea that focusing on renewable energy for air conditioning would be better. It's a pretty interesting topic.
Maybe if you tune into their podcast daily or something they have discussed more but that linked page doesn't contain any useful information on this topic.
That link sings the praises of shade, and does not mention a single downside or challenge with its recommendation (such as irrigation). It only even mentions air conditioning twice, never exploring any aspect of it.
In contrast, I edited my post with scientific studies demonstrating that the limited amount of air conditioning we have in place now is already more effective than the shade is expected to be after full deployment. If we can deploy air conditioning we can save far more lives.
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We should do all of these things. We need air conditioned spaces and renewable energy, but if we can reduce the urban heat island effect by increasing vegetation in general (and canopy in particular), then we won't need as much energy to cool those indoor spaces.
In general I agree but on a large scale, the areas that need the most shade also have the least amount of water.
Trees consume an incredible amount of water and that's a big deal in these places where the large shade trees don't grow naturally.
I see your point. Again, that's a problem that has a lot of different variables. First of all, any solution must be particular to the local conditions. Los Angeles is different from Seattle is different from Charleston is different from Paris is different from Venice (and so on). Second, different species of tree have dramatically different requirements and live in wildly different conditions.
For example, The American Southeast is full of live oaks, which provide lots of shade and are well suited to the environment there. Those trees wouldn't do as well in, for example, desert climates in Arizona; however, the Palo Verde tree thrives in that region, and is used as a street tree that provides shade, beauty, habitat, etc.
I wouldn't recommend slapping a bunch of oaks and maples in the Arizona desert, and I also wouldn't recommend covering South Carolina in Palo Verde.
Edit:
I also agree that there is an increasing need for energy efficient air conditioning that can be powered by renewable resources. I do not think vegetation is the only answer to this problem. We are at a stage where we need a multi-pronged approach to these vast and complicated issues.
Another reason why the us sucks! Hahaha.
They'll be more car crashes into tree deaths
Eliminate cars. Everyone walks or cycles. Outlaw personal vehicles.
Tbf if the roads are narrower, drivers drive slower Plus speed limit is often at 30km/h in the city means car crashes are essentially non lethal
My severe allergies would like to disagree!
Plant female trees. Back in the 50s through 80s and in many places still cities plant ONLY dioeciois tree varieties and then ONLY the males because female trees and non dioecious trees produce fruit... that eventually falls off and rots and needs to be cleaned up.
However by planting only male trees you get a ton of tree sperm that gets shot everywhere and gets all up in your face, your nose, and even your lungs.
Most trees are not male or female, they're both.
Yeah... which is why they pick very specific species of trees called dioecious that have a male and female gender. It's not as wide spread as some say but it's definitely an issue that plays a role.
Your allergies disagree that planting more trees would reduce heat deaths? Okay.
Thats a risk we're willing to take.
sweetplantveal t1_j6quw0e wrote
Trees make a place livable. I think we should be investing in urban forestry.