American Forests

Greening Solutions for Extreme Heat – Scaling a tree equity platform to advance climate resilience ($50,000)

Recipient: American Forests

Project Partners: CAPA Strategies, State of Rhode Island

Climate change is widely considered one of the greatest challenges to human survivorship, especially among those who have less access to resources and support. One of the more profound and insidious – yet largely misunderstood – disasters to affect humans and the built environment is urban heat. Exposure to heat claims more lives than all other natural disasters combined, yet fatalities to humans and impacts on infrastructure are largely preventable. A well understood strategy to reduce extreme heat is the use of greening techniques, particularly tree plantings. Trees provide essential shade, evapotranspiration the heat which increases cooling potential, and their capacity to provide these ‘ecosystem services’ increases as they mature and grow larger and older. American Forests has pioneered an evidence-based and technologically astute approach to addressing urban tree inequities with a Tree Equity Score. The project will 1) implement the Tree Equity Score for every urbanized neighborhood in the State of Rhode Island, which will measure how well the benefits of urban tree canopy are reaching low income communities, populations of color and populations that are particularly susceptible to extreme heat; (2) conduct a community-based urban heat field campaign in four municipalities within the State of Rhode Island -- Providence, East Providence, Pawtucket, and Central Falls; and (3) scale the empirical results from the four municipalities to the whole State, while integrating results into the Tree Equity Score. The scaling of the Tree Equity Score model is one of the penultimate aims of the urban heat campaigns, which, over time and with sufficient data, will support the creation of a national ambient temperature and humidity dataset.