“They say the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best time is right now.”
The Forest City is not as forested as its name suggests. Sheila Creighton is the Partnerships and Marketing Manager at ReForest London, a nonprofit organization devoted to protecting and planting trees. She spoke about how forested the Forest City really is.
“London’s tree cover is lower than it should be for a healthy urban environment. So we’re hoping to add to those trees and make the city greener.”
As of 2015, 24% of London has tree coverage, below what is recommended for a healthy urban environment. London, though, has a pledge to increase that coverage to 34%.
An increase of 10% might not seem like a lot, but the expected date which the city hopes to hit that by is 2065. And that’s if everything goes to plan.
The Urban Forestry department has released a three-year plan from 2020-2023. They outline how many trees they will plant, and how much that will cost taxpayers. The short of it is they will plant 18,000 trees a year for 0.75% of the yearly property tax budget.
ReForest London is a “nonprofit organization with the mission to plant and protect trees.” Creighton spoke about what planting and protecting means.
“We’re dedicated to partnering with our community to enhance the environmental and human health in the Forest City. And we’re doing that by inspiring people, educating people and empowering them to get involved to plant and care for trees.”
As for the reason why trees are important to the Forest City, she says that they are important for any urban environment.
“They obviously give us a lot of benefits, the biggest one being that they clean the air. They also offer protection against flooding, they cool your house– if you properly plant trees around your home, you can reduce your heating and cooling bills by 15%. Easily. They offer beauty, they offer habitat for wildlife, they offer privacy.”
“You can plant and take care of trees. You can come out and volunteer to plant trees. You can just tell people about it. We have one initiative called the Million Tree Challenge. And that’s a challenge to the whole community to plant a million new trees. And we’re about halfway there. We’re almost a half a million. That’s a great mechanism for getting people to get involved, because everybody can take part. Everybody can plant the tree, whether they have land or not. They can sponsor a tree to be planted if they live in a condo, or they can come out to a park planting and help plant trees.”
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