[CANUFNET] Follow-up on private tree by-laws

[Amber Cantell]

Hi all,

Thank you, Peter and Alice, for the replies regarding my questions around
tree protection by-laws - I really appreciate your thoughts and insights.
So far I haven't heard back from any municipalities on the effectiveness
and efficacy of their by-law, which I am a bit surprised by. It seems to me
that, in order for a municipality to make an informed decision about how
best to allocate urban forestry dollars, the cost versus benefits needs to
be known, so I would have thought perhaps someone out there would have
already done this analysis in development of their own policies.

For example, if 90% of the permit requests a municipality receives are for
trees that would have to come down anyways (dead or in poor condition), the
municipality would have to do the legwork (and paperwork) for 9 trees for
every one that they might actually protect. (And then even for that one,
there's the question of whether or not the cutting is approved or not, so
the number protected would likely, in fact, be even smaller).

That's a very different return on investment than one would get if, say,
70% of the permit requests that come in are for trees that are healthy and
"should" remain standing and most of the removals being done in an area are
discretionary in nature. A municipality in this situation gets a lot more
out of their money (and staff time) than one that has to spend most of its
permitting costs on trees that will come down anyways.

For example, here in London, we have about 4.4 million trees in our urban
area. If they were to average a 100 year lifespan (just using a rough
estimate), then that would work out to roughly 44,000 trees dying (and
"needing") to come down each year. We know about half of our trees here are
in open space (parks, ESAs, etc., where presumably most would not be cut
but be left to die naturally) but the other half are not. That would work
out to 22,000 trees a year. If permits were only required for the largest
of these - say, the top 10% - that's still 2,200 permits a year - before
dealing with any trees that people want to bring down "just because". Not a
small amount of paperwork, especially if site visits are to be involved in
order to get a permit. (And you'd have to hope site visits are involved in
at least some of the cases, otherwise, it'd just be red tape for the sake
of red tape!)

In terms of whether or not locally we can keep up with this level of loss
through an arbor day planting alone - 22,000 trees would certainly be a lot
to manage! Across all the different organizations involved locally in tree
planting here in London, I know of around 3,300 trees being given away in
our city for National Tree Day this year, and that's quite a lot of work to
pull off. (Which isn't to say that a city as a whole can't keep up with
cutting rates, only that, it does take quite a concerted and ongoing effort
to do so).

I guess I'm just very surprised no one (?) seems to have numbers on this
that could help inform the development of public policy and to compare the
cost efficiency of tree by-laws versus other options for increasing canopy
cover.

There's also the question of what's the "best" threshold for protection -
for example, most municipalities with tree protection bylaws protect their
largest trees, but these are also the ones most likely to die of natural
causes/not have many years left to live (and so presumably, that ratio of
"cutting trees out of necessity" vs. "cutting trees for
convenience/personal preference" would be worse). It'd be interesting to
see if any municipality purposely protected the smaller trees, since they'd
likely be healthier and have longer to live. (Perhaps not as "intuitive" an
approach, but maybe one that would do more to protect the canopy in the
long term).

I'm hoping locally we'll be able to monitor some of the trends arising from
permitting results here (we recently had a by-law passed here in London),
but maybe this (the cost and effectiveness of private tree bylaws under
different circusmtances) would be a good research project, if anyone out
there is looking for one. (One of many, many ideas out there, I am sure!)

Many thanks again to Peter and Alice for their comments, and if anyone else
has anything to add, I would be very interested in hearing it, especially
if there are any municipalities out there that do have data on the subject.

Cheers,
Amber

-- 

Amber Cantell

Director of Programs, ReForest London

519-936-9548 x224

reforestlondon.ca <http://www.reforestlondon.ca>




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