On June 6, 2019, I was invited to a workshop to discuss trees and their beneficial effects to health by The Nature Conservancy of Illinois at the 2019 Pritzker Forum on Global Cities Workshop "Nature for Urban Health” at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.
On July 9, 2019, I attended CRTI's Lydia Scott's presentation at Chi Hack Night on “Using Urban Forestry Data to Improve Health and Quality of Life in the Chicago Region.” I approached Lydia and we began fruitful conversations around how trees and public health data can be used together to improve community health.
This repo was then created on July 19, 2019 to develop a public health strategy to improve Chicago's urban canopy using a health equity lens to equitably plant new trees driven by community, maintining and preserving existing trees, improving tree benefit communications, and providing workforce development and job training. At first, this was a scan of the environment for evidence-based research, resources, best-practices, etc. It also serves to accelerate the latest science and innovative porgamming to promote alignment and unification of ad hoc and disparate tree initiatives across all stakeholders into a cohesive and coordinated approach to tree planting and sustainability of Chicago’s urban canopy by prioritizing vulnerable communities.
I began a TreeKeepers certification through Openlands that I completed on December 7, 2019. CDPH was later invited to join CRTI’s Executive Advisory Council in March 2020 and we began to collaborate with their GIS Admin around their LiDAR-based land cover data that was showing less trees in historically marginalized and underserved communities.
Using CDPH's Healthy Chicago 2025 plan to advance racial equity to close Chicago’s life expectancy gap to frame a tree equity strategy using public health indicators, under the section “Further the Health and Vibrancy of Neighborhoods” where all communities should have equitable access to environments that promote optimal health and well-being. To further the health of neighborhoods, the City of Chicago has adopted a “health in all policies” approach to make sure that the government works with communities to shape our social, economic, and physical environments in ways that promote health and racial equity.
During this time, we were working on Phase 1 of The Partnership for Healthy Cities award that was applied for by CDPH in 2017 and the award given to the Center for Spatial Data Science to collect and visualize baseline air quality data for the City of Chicago from NASA satellites, EPA sensor networks, USGS, and NOAA climate data. In Phase 2, we added trees in 2020 after pitching trees for public health was made internally and then to CRTI and USFS in December 2019 to add CRTI's Tree Canopy data to add public health, environmental, social and economic data to better understand tree canopy in vulnerable neighborhoods throughout the city and to reduce the impacts of climate change on these communities. The Center for Spatial Data Science created an Environmental Tool that is being piloted since late 2021.
While the data and evidence shows that there is a tree equity disparity in urban canopies across the US, this is not lost on communities that already have a small exposure to an urban forest around their neighborhoods. As a result, they may become more vulnerable to urban heat islands, flooding, air pollution, and other climate change effects, and less likely to benefit from the known health and environmental advantages of having a robust urban canopy. The latest research by CRTI shows that Chicago has one of the smallest urban canopies of any big city in the US, based on 2010 data from the Chicago Region Trees Initiative Priority Map.
Prioritizing communities based on sociodemographics, health, air quality, weather, climate, and tree canopy data may better determine the allocation of community building, green corps job training, and tree plantings. Several Chicago community organizations already have existing plans for Chicago's and their neighborhood's urban canopy. We want to borrow from their successes to complement our work and not to replace their plans.
Through discussions with local and national partners, the data on tree census and estimation of the canopy density and heights using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), new tools may better assist in the determination of communities with reduced urban canopies that may also have greater needs due to higher chronic cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases, high hardship, low child opportunity, and low air quality.
The benefit of trees are multifold and include: promoting and improving physical and mental health, improving social cohesion, reducing stress, increasing property values, reducing energy bills, mitigating climate change, reducing urban heat islands and increasing cooling effects, decreasing soil erosion, storm water management and flood prevention, reducing air pollution, repairing local tree biodiversity, providing critical bird, small animal and essential insect habitats, amongst many other environmental benefits. In the end, this is only accomplished by empowering residents who live in and already maintain their existing trees, and working with them to protect and restore their community trees.