“I wanted to do something that would benefit as many people from the community as possible,” says Chloe Straw, pointing at a small but promising sapling visible through the window of her local cafe.
In 2023, Chloe began chatting to her neighbours in Haringey, north London, about trees. “I thought it’d be really nice to raise some money for trees on the main road. Everyone uses West Green Road, regardless of whether you have a lot of money or not, regardless of your background.”
After getting in touch with Trees for Streets, a sponsorship scheme that guides communities across England on how to plant trees in their local areas with support from local councils, a small group was formed to work out how to do it. As a first step, Straw and friends were provided with an interactive map to choose the location of the trees, and that was passed along to Haringey council.
Then they got help to set up a crowdfunding campaign, which was shared in local WhatsApp groups and community forums, secured 168 backers and raised more than £6,000 in one month.
Mohamed al-Jawhari, a co-chair of Haringey Living Streets, said: “It [WhatsApp] is a very powerful tool for getting a very simple message out very quickly to a lot of people. I got in contact with, like, a thousand people in a few minutes, because I forwarded on the message with a bit of an explanation to a local group here, a local group there, people who were interested in the environment and maybe wanted to help West Green.”
The remaining costs were covered by Haringey council. The result? Twenty beautiful trees planted across the neighbourhood.
The plan is as local as it gets, but it is also global. Around the world, city residents are working out how to fill their streets with trees as evidence grows of their benefits. As temperatures rise, research has shown that urban trees can play a fundamental role in keeping cities cool, evaporating water to provide a natural form of air-conditioning, cooling air temperatures andreducing the urban heat island effect. Work by Friends of the Earth in five English cities in 2023 showed that areas with more trees and greenery wereup to 5C cooler.
Cities and countriies are applying all kinds of models. Some councils and governments plant the trees using public money. In 2021, for example, the Canadian government launched the 2 Billion Trees programme, providing financial support to provinces, organisations and Indigenous governments to plant trees over a period of 10 years.
But public funds are stretched everywhere, and the community model followed by Trees for Streets empowers local people to take their own action without waiting for a government plan.
The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) is a non-profit organisation in Philadelphia that trains individuals to lead community groups to plant treesacross the US city. So far their programme, Tree Tenders, has trained more than 6,500 people, who have led volunteers in planting more than 3,000 trees each year.
Andrew Conboy, an urban forester in Philadelphia whose work involves managing, maintaining and replanting street and park trees in the city, said: “Most of the tree planting in Philadelphia is done through PHS. They do really great work all around the city and also in the suburbs surrounding the city. So many groups surrounding the cities are Tree Tenders groups.”
He added: “There’s a heavy emphasis on native species here in the Philadelphia area, which is good thing because the native species are ultimately better for our wildlife and for our ecosystems, because those are the species that evolved here, and our wildlife need those species.”
The Garden City Fund, a charity in Singapore, runs a similar initiative, the Plant-a-Tree programme. Individuals and organisations can donate to the cost of a young tree and then plant it in one of their managed green spaces.
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Tree People, anenvironmental advocacy organisation, runs a forestry programme that supports communities to plant and care for trees in cities in southern California. The organisation also runs the School Greening programme, which provides training to parents, students, teachers and district leaders to plant and maintain trees in schools. Since the organisation was founded in 1973, it has worked with 3 million volunteers to plant more than 3m trees, included 30,000 trees on school campuses.
As the West Green residents take turns discussing their local initiative over cups of coffee, it’s clear that one of the most significant impacts the project has had is in strengthening connections within the community.
Nick Owen, the owner of the local cafe Perkyn’s on West Green Road, who contributed to the crowdfunder, said: “It’s lovely having the trees here now but it also feels a bit like a legacy. In five or 10 years when these trees are getting bigger and fuller, it’ll be beautiful to see our kids growing up with that as well and knowing that we contributed to it.”
Dan Snell, an urban forest officer at Haringey council who surveyed the location for the trees in West Green and works with communities on tree-planting initiatives across the borough, said: “We have people who are enthusiastic about the long-term health of the trees and we want it to be something they can take ownership of, I suppose, like an extension of their home, something that’s in the public realm but is also looked after by the community.
“There was another tree scheme on my mum’s street who lives in Haringey … suddenly there were all these new street trees and my mum had met a load of neighbours that she hadn’t really met before, even though she’s been there for 30 years. It’s had this really lovely long-term effect on bringing the street together. It’s such a wonderful thing to connect over.”