Oakland’s Urban Tree Dreams Get (Partially) Funded

OAKLAND’S CANOPY BY THE NUMBERS

56,000
Street trees

12,000
Trees in parks

21.5%
2018 canopy cover (from 9% in flatlands to 43% in the hills)

6,000
Trees lost each year

12,500
Plantings needed each year to increase tree cover by 1%

$15 million
Cost per year of planting that many trees

$8 million
U.S. Forest Service grant to aid Oakland’s urban trees

8x
How much San Francisco outspends Oakland on urban forestry (with 1.77x the trees)

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Everyone knows to seek shade on hot days. But it was a mild spring day at Oakland’s Hoover Elementary School—just 65 degrees Fahrenheit—when Wanda Stewart realized just how powerful the sun could be. For that day, Stewart, and Green Schoolyards America, checked the temperature of the black rubber padding under the school’s play structure. It was 152 degrees—nearly hot enough to cook an egg. 

“That was the day that I went, ‘Wow. We need to find a way to shade these children,’ ” says Stewart, executive director of the West Oakland nonprofit Common Vision, which plants fruit tree orchards at low-income schools.

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With limited resources, the tree services unit—which once planted an average of 1,000 trees a year—has been prioritizing high-risk emergencies, like trees that are about to fall, over routine maintenance. There’s a backlog of trees in need of removal. In the city’s project narrative for restoring its urban forest, staffers wrote: “Street trees throughout Oakland are in dire need of attention … Many whole tree or large branch failures could have been prevented each year had proactive maintenance and pruning been performed in proceeding [sic] years.” The narrative continues: “This is an example of how Oakland has failed its disadvantaged communities.” 

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Oakland has a plan. It’s a big one.

The Forest Service grant arrived just as the city released a draft of an ambitious 50-year plan to reinvigorate its urban forest and address its tree inequities. The plan will likely be presented to the city council to vote on its adoption in the first quarter of 2024. The goal is to “kickstart the tree maintenance,” says David Moore, a city tree supervisor, who contributed to the plan’s development. 

“Trees are a social justice issue,” he says. “We need everyone’s participation.”

Historical photos, timelines, charts, and tree clip art fill the plan’s 177 pages. The first four chapters provide an overview of Oakland’s current urban forest, and highlight its management and the equity-based approach the city will take to restore it. The last chapter outlines potential next steps, including 70-plus potential action items like reinstating a citywide tree maintenance and planting program and inventorying the city’s trees every 10 years. The plan is meant to be a “living document,” which the city will update every five to 10 years “based on the changing needs of Oakland’s trees, community priorities, and implementation progress.” 

But how it all pans out will depend on funding. “Oakland’s urban forestry program lacks a dedicated funding source and instead relies on a variety of funds that shift and change each budget cycle,” the plan notes. The $8 million from the IRA will help get this plan started, though it falls well short of the $22.5 million the city asked for, which was intended to fund the plan’s first five years. 

Just to halt the decline and maintain the current tree canopy would require planting nearly 6,000 trees per year. In its original, larger grant proposal, Oakland aimed to plant 800 trees per year in disadvantaged neighborhoods. That much money could pay for 4,000 trees over five years, still just a fraction of what’s needed. But having received much less—the grant program was overwhelmed with applicants—the city and its partners are now paring down their ambitions. “We are in the process of rescoping,” Moore wrote, and added, “We are re-prioritizing services according to equity priority.”

The city is doing so with the help of its two nonprofit partners, Common Vision and the Oakland Parks and Recreation Foundation. “Teaming up with others allows you to go further,” said Stewart, of Common Vision. “And that’s the thought that we all have in terms of this grant.”

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Public to city: ‘More native plants!’

The public has had a lot to say about its trees. In the month and a half since the draft’s release, people have posted more than 800 comments on the online plan. They ask for multilingual fliers on the benefits of trees. They encourage property owners to fund street tree plantings. They request tree planting along particular streets, like International Boulevard or Fruitvale Avenue. They voice concerns over sudden oak death, and make comparisons to other cities’ tree management.

But again and again, commenters clamor for the same thing: “Please add more native plants and trees to the City of Oakland’s Urban Forest Plan!” Of the 64 trees approved by the city for public planting, eight are native species, they note. Though some commenters acknowledge the need for diverse species as the city looks toward an uncertain climatic future, most express concern over the lack of native species. 

Joe McBride, a UC Berkeley emeritus professor of urban forestry, reviewed the draft. “I think more native species could be used, especially species from southern California that are more likely to do well as the climate gets warmer,” wrote McBride in an email. “I think the concern over so few native species identified in the plan is a valid concern.” 

Native trees—particularly clusters or corridors of native trees and natural habitat—are important to consider because “they drive biodiversity,” according to Robin Grossinger, a scientist formerly with the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s urban forest lab who founded Second Nature Ecology and Design, an urban design consulting firm. Often, a more biodiverse natural area is a more resilient one, particularly in the face of a changing climate, and, Grossinger notes, “exposure to biodiverse nature benefits people’s health and well-being.”

Moore, the city’s tree specialist, emailed that “many of the comments about tree species are beyond the scope of the Plan” and would be most effective during the plan’s later phases. Implementation, he writes, is to be determined, and depends on the plan getting approved and funded. “The City will continue to use the most current climate research and arboricultural best management practices to choose appropriate tree species,” wrote Moore. “We appreciate so many people being interested and passionate about Oakland’s trees.”

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The (ecological) work that trees do

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BY THE NUMBERS

13,280 tons
Estimated carbon Oakland trees absorb each year

100 million gallons
Estimated stormwater Oakland trees intercept and absorb

680,000 pounds
Estimated air pollutants Oakland trees remove each year 

2–9 degrees Fahrenheit
Cooling effect Oakland trees can provide during summer

More than 30
Days per year Oakland temperatures are expected to rise above 86 degrees F, by the end of the century (currently under 7 days per year)

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Do trees need so much attention? On the surface, they can seem like embellishments on the urban landscape, not critical in the way shelter, water, safety, and food are. But the trees that grow amid the concrete are public infrastructure, underpinning the health of our urban ecosystems—and the health of its residents. “Urban trees are the hardest working trees in America,” says Beattra Wilson, the Forest Service’s assistant director for urban and community forestry. City trees provide shade, famously—but they also sequester carbon, save buildings energy, filter stormwater, reduce runoff, and provide habitat for wildlife. (Also, “unlike other types of infrastructure that lose value, with proper maintenance the value of Oakland’s public trees actually increases over time,” as the city’s draft Urban Forest Plan says.) 

As the Bay Area warms—potentially 8 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100—our urban trees will become even more important, experts say. This is especially true in areas with lots of paved surfaces where temperatures rise much higher, and heat lingers longer. “Studies have shown, if we could plant more trees in the city centers, this heat island effect will be diminished,” says McBride, professor emeritus at UC Berkeley. 

Trees actually cool their surroundings, and not only by shading them. They do it by sweating, in a way; it’s called evapotranspiration. As trees draw water up from their roots, the water transforms from liquid to gas. As that water evaporates, the tree pulls in heat from its surroundings—thus cooling them—much like what happens when an ice cube melts. The water vapor exits through tiny, mouth-like openings on the outsides of each leaf, and the tree transpires.

Trees can also purify the air, removing pollutants through two different processes, McBride says. Some pollutants attach electrostatically to the surface of leaves. Some, like ozone, are absorbed through those mouth-like openings in leaves and enter the cellular spaces inside. 

In studies in California and around the world, scientists have found that more urban tree canopy coverage is generally associated with healthier residents—less serious asthma, diabetes, and blood pressure, and even better social cohesion. (Though causality is hard to pin down, as MicBride and other researchers have noted. It’s possible the correlation, or some of it, can be explained by the fact that wealthier people can simply afford both better health care and more forested real estate.) 

But the host of benefits trees provide are spread unevenly across our cities. 

Especially Oakland.