If elected into office, the ABC Vancouver party will plant 100,000 new additional trees across Vancouver, specifically in areas that have fewer trees.
These trees will be planted over four years, throughout the first term of a majority ABC Vancouver municipal government. This strategy is being billed to be more ambitious than any tree planting policies proposed by other candidates and parties.
Such plantings would be on top of existing municipal targets and initiatives, and similar in scale to the Urban Forest Strategy previously put forward by Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson more than a decade ago.
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With a warming climate, expanding the city’s tree canopy will help moderate the sweltering summer heat, but not all neighbourhoods have historically benefited from tree planting programs equally.
The City of Vancouver’s urban heat map from its 2018 Urban Forest Strategy update shows Westside neighbourhoods are overall considerably cooler than Eastside areas. This is not only due to tree planting programs, but the Westside has seen less development throughout its history as opposed to the Eastside’s comparatively newer neighbourhoods. Stringent policies protecting existing trees from being removed in the development process did not come into effect until more recently.
It will take decades for trees planted in the Eastside to mature into the thick canopies found in the Westside.
Moreover, eastern areas of Vancouver are the location of the bulk of the city’s industrial land supply, where trees are generally incompatible with the flexible industrial operations demanding large paved sites.
In recent months, there has been some attention to the lack of trees and higher summer temperatures in and around the Downtown Eastside. This is largely a combination of poor soils and a lack of impervious surfaces due to the area’s compact urban development — a legacy of being the oldest urban area of the city.
āHistoric bias in zoning practices have led to a heat distribution disparity of up to 20Ā°C between Vancouver neighbourhoods,ā said Mike Klassen, a city councillor candidate for ABC Vancouver.
āIt will take up to twenty years for adequate tree canopies to form and have an impact on heat in neighbourhoods, we need to act now.”
Peter Meiszner, another candidate running for city councillor under ABC Vancouver, emphasized that it is just as important that existing trees are provided with the proper maintenance “as many existing trees in Vancouver are not being properly looked after.”
In late 2020, the Vancouver Park Board approved a strategy of planting tens of thousands of additional trees on city streets, parks, and other public spaces over the coming decades — an effort to grow the tree canopy from 23% in 2020 to 30% by 2050.
This comes after the city reached its previous target of planting 150,000 additional trees by 2020, an initiative that began in 2011 under the previous Greenest City Action Plan (GCAP).
GCAP grew the tree canopy from 18% to 23%, now covering 26 sq km of the City of Vancouverās land base of 115 sq km. The tree canopy is the area of ground that leaves, branches, and stems cover when viewed from above.
The civic election is scheduled for October 15, 2022.