Idea behind analyzer is that all neighbourhoods should have access to canopy benefits
This article was written by Patty Winsa and was published in the Toronto Star on June 10, 2024.
In Toronto, neighbourhood equity is typically viewed through a socioeconomic lens, dividing us into haves and have-nots.
But there’s another factor that contributes to our wealth — trees.
And a new online tool that maps tree equity throughout the city, weighing canopy cover against a number of indicators such as poverty, climate and health, shows that many of the factors that divide us socio-economically are the same when it comes to the canopy.
“In neighbourhoods with higher poverty rates or more residents of colour, there is almost 40 per cent less tree coverage than more affluent or more white areas of Toronto, according to data analyzed by American Forests, the non-profit that created the online tool, called TESA — Tree Equity Score Analyzer — in conjunction with the city.”
The tool, the first of its kind in Canada, is not just for municipal use. It is free and publicly accessible.
And because studies by the city show that the potential to expand the canopy is greatest on private land — over which the city has no access — Toronto forestry staff hope grassroots groups, or commercial and residential property owners, will use it to plant trees in areas with lower scores. The lower the score, the greater the priority.
“This is why the tool is so powerful,” said Connie Pinto, Toronto’s supervisor of forestry policy and standards, “because it helps you take control of private land to lift all because the private-public ownership is about 50-50 in the city,” she said.
“I would think that a community group — a residents association for example — certainly, a campaign to improve tree canopy in their neighbourhood, coming from their own neighbour, has better traction than urban forestry coming in and saying ‘we would like to do this,’ ” said Pinto. “And that’s really the strength that it’s having in the U.S.”
The concept of tree equity was first floated by American Forests, founded in 1875 to protect and restore forests. The non-profit received a grant in 2019 to develop the first tree equity score analyzer for Rhode Island. The organization created a U.S.-wide tree equity analyzer a year later, then numerous other U.S. cities and now Toronto.
The idea behind TESA is that everyone should have “access to the benefits that trees provide no matter where you live in the city,” said Janet McKay, the executive director of Local Enhancement and Appreciation of Forests (LEAF), a non-profit that helped Toronto develop the tool with American Forests. LEAF runs a backyard treeplanting program, offering native trees and shrubs to property owners at a subsidized cost.
The map of Toronto’s tree equity shows that the city has an overall equity score of 80, but within Toronto, scores range from 41 to 100, according to the area.
The equity tool will allow community groups such as Cliffcrest Butterflyway, a Scarborough organization that gives away 800 trees to residents both in the spring and fall, to target local residents who may not even know that the tree giveaway exists.
“Our problem is how do you reach people who need trees the most,” said Dorte Windmuller, who founded Cliffcrest Butterflyway as a way to give residents advice on restoring native plants. “You can easily reach gardeners who are also already crazy about plants.
“The people who are living in the neighbourhoods that have low canopy, they most likely work three jobs,” said Windmuller. “And maybe they also are not connected to any of these groups and they might not speak the language. So how do you reach them? And we have always struggled to do that.”
Currently, the city’s canopy coverage is 31 per cent across public and private lands, which represents about 11.5 million trees. Toronto made a commitment around 2010 to increase the canopy to 40 per cent by 2050, an idea that was championed by American Forests around that time. Numerous municipalities made a similar commitment to reach that goal.
But in the years that followed, the U.S. non-profit concluded that tree equity was a more important goal than just a number.
And, American Forests created TESA in partnership with the University of Vermont, driven, it said, because of climate change and public health.
Heat-related deaths are expected to have a 10-fold increase in the eastern U.S., according to the nonprofit, and in Canada, at least a thousand people in B.C. and Quebec have died from heat events since 2009, according to Health Canada.
An analysis by American Forests shows that during heat waves in Toronto, street temperatures are 2.5 to 5 C degrees hotter in areas that have an average 56 per cent less tree canopy than areas that are on average 0 to 2.5 C cooler.
Heat disparity by neighbourhood is one of the layers that can be viewed in the mapping tool, along with the tree equity score and other factors such as poverty and income.
And, a user can dial down to the block and property level to see where there is potential to plant trees, as well as input data to show how many trees need to be planted in an area to raise its score.
The city has been using the methodology behind TESA for a number of years — before the online equity score analyzer for Toronto was created — as one parameter to determine where it should plant trees after Pinto read about tree equity on the American Forests website.
The city’s forestry department has a robust tree planting program, planting roughly 120,000 trees and shrubs per year across many different programs. In 2024, its budget was $85 million, half of which goes to tree maintenance with roughly 18 per cent spent on tree planting.
“What we really needed was a prioritization tool to say where do we prioritize our interventions and where should that happen?” said Kim Statham, director of the city’s urban forestry department, explaining why the city adopted the methodology.
“And that should happen with an equity lens. And that’s why we took the American Forests model a few years ago to say, ‘if I had a dollar to spend, where should I be spending it? If I had one tree to plant, where should I plant it?’ ” said Statham.
“And it needs to be planted in the neighbourhoods with equity considerations.”
Data from American Forests shows that to reach a tree equity score of 100, the city would need to protect the existing canopy and expand it by 82.2 square kilometres by planting roughly 1.5 million trees.
The benefits, compiled by American Forests, would be multi-fold and include:
■ The additional canopy would sequester nearly 16,000 tonnes of carbon annually, equivalent to offsetting nearly 13,600 homes energy use;
■ It would prevent 957 million litres of stormwater runoff from entering waterways annually;
■ The additional canopy would remove 15 tonnes of PM2.5 — fine particulate matter that can affect the lungs — annually, which is equivalent to removing 77,600 gaspowered cars from the road.
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