Task Force focuses on urban forest in development of climate action strategy; Redlands, CA

Task Force urges alternative transportation - Redlands Daily Facts:
The Climate Action Task Force may be able to help Redlands reduce its carbon emissions.
The group addresses how the city can do this in its Climate Action and Sustainability Plan. The Storing and Offsetting Carbon Emissions and the Efficient Transportation subcommittees made recommendations to help this goal along.
The first of the two subcommittees looked at easy ways the city could help minimize Redlands' carbon emissions.
'Our main focus revolved around the urban forest,' said Dan Rendler, chair of the Storing and Offsetting Carbon Emissions subcommittee. 'That's making the right selection of trees in the city so we aren't letting greenhouse gasses out.'

Cambridge Climate Congress - are plans aspirational abstractions or actual? Cambridge, MA

Guest commentary: Defining green in Cambridge - Cambridge, Massachusetts - Cambridge Chronicle:
Here are a few items pulled from the 2002 report that seem to lack follow-through.
Optimize building design and the use of vegetation to shade buildings and reduce the urban heat island effect. Use geographic information systems to map the city’s tree canopy coverage and assess the environmental services provided by the urban forest; maximize the tree canopy cover, particularly over parking lots and air-conditioning units; install roofs with high reflectance or “green” landscaped roofs; incorporate reflectance and shading standards in designs for parking lots and building construction.
I know of no green roofs that have been created in response to this plan, and the city seems not to do a good job or maintaining or replacing its trees.
Promote Transit Improvements. Support extension of the Green Line, acquisition of alternative fuel buses, and plans for the Urban Ring.
To date, I have only seen one Green Line Extension meeting at which our city had official representation.

Toronto Hydro transforms battle between power lines and trees, looks to solutions that protect both; Toronto, Canada

Protecting a city's greenery, one branch at a time:
Trees earn their keep in the urban landscape.
'Trees can help us enjoy our urban life so much more,' says Janet McKay, executive director, Local Enhancement and Appreciation of Forests (LEAF).
Beyond their natural beauty, urban trees improve the quality of urban life in countless ways. Their leaves produce oxygen while removing carbon dioxide from the air, with an average tree cleaning up four to five kilograms of pollution in a year. They help prevent soil erosion and are natural habitats for birds, insects and other urban wildlife.
Trees provide privacy, add to a home's value and can lower home heating and cooling costs by up to 10%. Not surprisingly, the City of Toronto has set the goal of increasing the city's tree canopy to 30% coverage in 2020 from 18% in 2006. And Toronto Hydro Corp. is committed to helping.
'We do a yearly Earth Day tree-planting event with Toronto Hydro,' Ms. McKay says. 'More than 100 Toronto Hydro employees come out and we plant several hundred trees and shrubs. They're just amazing and are so willing and keen to help out.'
Among its other tree initiatives, the corporation, which was LEAF's first corporate sponsor 11 years ago, has planted 10,000 native trees across Toronto in partnership with the Ontario Forestry Association.
But for all their benefits, when the wind blows and the storms pound, trees can cause havoc, with fallen branches crashing into cars, homes - or worse, people. And they can bring down a power line in a flash, turning it into a live hazard on the ground, leaving homes and businesses without power.
Because of this, overhead power lines and trees have historically been at odds. In recent years, however, Toronto Hydro has been transforming these odds into opportunities for greater efficiency, public safety and healthier urban trees.

Tree cover and agricultural land not natural enemies as supposed

Tree cover far bigger than expected on farms: study | Green Business | Reuters
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters)
- Almost half of the world's farmland has at least 10 percent tree cover, according to a study on Monday indicating that farmers are far less destructive to carbon-storing forests than previously believed.
'The area revealed in this study is twice the size of the Amazon, and shows that farmers are protecting and planting trees spontaneously,' Dennis Garrity, Director General of the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi, said in a statement.
The Centre's report, based on satellite images and the first to estimate tree cover on the world's farms, showed tree canopies exceeded 10 percent on farmland of 10 million square kms (3.9 million sq miles) -- 46 percent of all agricultural land and an area the size of Canada or China.

ALSO COVERED IN: Can farms and forests mix?

India's forest and tree cover are significant carbon sinks, key elements of CO2 mitigation strategy; India

Forests will rescue India, says Jairam Ramesh DEVELOPMENT NEWS MyNews.in:
India's Forest Cover accounts for 20.6% of the total geographical area of the country as of 2005. In addition, Tree Cover accounts for 2.8% of India's geographical area.

Over the last two decades, progressive national forestry legislations and policies in India aimed at conservation and sustainable management of forests have reversed deforestation and have transformed India's forests into a significant net sink of CO2.

From 1995 to 2005, the carbon stocks stored in our forests and trees have increased from 6,245 million tonnes (mt) to 6,662 mt, registering an annual increment of 38 mt of carbon or 138 mt of CO2 equivalent.

California leads the way in connecting trees and forests to climate change strategies; California, USA

California forests hold one answer to climate change - Los Angeles Times
The state is a leader in setting up a program to offset heat-trapping emissions by investing in woodlands.
By Margot Roosevelt
4:55 PM PDT, May 31, 2009
Reporting from Arcata, Calif. -- Silvery light flickers through the Redwood canopy of the Van Eck forest down to a fragrant carpet of needles and thimbleberry brush. A brook splashes along polished stones, through thickets of ferns.
How lush. How lovely. How lucrative.
This 2,200-acre spread in Humboldt County does well by doing good. For the last four years, Van Eck's foresters restricted logging, allowing trees to do what trees do: absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The conservation foundation that oversees the forest then calculated that carbon bonus and sold it for $2 million to individuals and companies trying to offset some 185,000 metric tons of their greenhouse gas emissions.
'Forests can be managed like a long-term carbon bank,' said Laurie Wayburn, president of the Pacific Forest Trust, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that oversees Van Eck. Selling offsets, she said, is like 'writing checks on the account.'

Public-private partnership to increase UTC on private property and mitigate GHG; Courtenay, BC, Canada; 2/6/09

Nursery, city promoting treeplanting projectComox Valley Record - Courtenay,British Columbia,Canada
River Meadow Farms Nursery and the City of Courtenay are partnering in a project they hope will see residents plant 1,000 trees.
Council authorized staff to enter into a partnership whereby the nursery will sell residents trees at a discounted rate to plant on residential property in an effort to increase the urban tree canopy and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the city Monday.
This tree-planting initiative is a recommended action of the city’s Corporate Climate Action Strategy.
The residential tree planting partnership is proposed to launch this March as the 1,000 Trees program.
The goal of the program is to have residents plant 1,000 trees, which would equate to a two-tonne annual GHG offset or a 160-tonne offset through the estimated 80-year carbon-removing life of the trees, noted Henderson and Wiwchar.

Philadelphia, PA; 1/14/09

The City of Philadelphia is launching a Carbon Offset Website ...Hughes says initial proceeds will help increase Philly’s overall tree canopy from 15% to 20%, which means about 300000 more trees planted. One aim, says Hughes, is that local corporations spending millions of dollars a year in Carbon ...

Earth; 12/23/08

New Science & Technology: How do trees affect the weather? Whether ...Trees affect our climate, and therefore our weather, in three primary ways: they lower temperatures, reduce energy usage and reduce or remove air pollutants. Each part of the tree contributes to climate control, from leaves to roots.
Leaves help turn down the thermostat. They cool the air through a process called evapotranspiration. It may seem like an invisible process to our eyes, but a large oak tree is capable of transpiring 40,000 gallons of water into the atmosphere during one year [source: USGS].

Burlington, VT; 12/22/08

URBAN FORESTRY URBAN FORESTRY URBAN FORESTRY URBAN FORESTRY ...Increase Burlington’s Urban Tree Canopy to 50% (from current 43%) ... Use the Urban Tree Canopy (UTC) Study to identify areas of the city with highest ...