Neighborhoods with more trees and green space stay cooler, while those coated with layers of asphalt swelter. Lower-income neighborhoods tend to be hottest, a city report found, and they have the least tree canopy.
The same is true in cities across the country, where poor and minority neighborhoods disproportionately suffer the consequences of rising temperatures. Research shows the temperatures in a single city, from Portland, Oregon, to Baltimore, can vary by up to 20 degrees. For a resident in a leafy suburb, a steamy summer day may feel uncomfortable. But for their friend a few neighborhoods over, it’s more than uncomfortable — it’s dangerous.
Trees are a good thing? Who knew?
Not like they’ve been part of the ecosystem for
billionshundreds of millions of years or anything.More like 375 million years, about the middle Devonian period.
Tangentally: for millions of years after plants started using lignin as a structural material the decomposers couldn’t break it down very effectively, so for like 60 million years lots of that tough plant material stacked up into deep layers and eventually turned into coal.
Subscribe.
But car drivers crash into them and hurt themselves sometimes or birds perch and poop on cars. Not worth having trees /s
If you live some place in a drought, water is an issue when planting new trees.
But if you don’t plant trees, there will continue to be droughts, as trees help to regulate humidity and precipitation. Farmers in drought-prone areas actually plant trees (agroforestry) in order to reduce crop losses due to drought. Even in urban areas, planting trees (especially natives) can have many benefits for reducing the impact of drought. Of course, a diverse forest ecosystem would be most resilient.
Here’s a study from 2019 quantifying the superiority of trees over artificial shade structures: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1618866718304291
Tl;dr is that tree shade is 2-5° C cooler than artificial shade. Time to start lobbying city councils to plant trees all over and ideally include fruit trees for some urban edible forest action.