Trees Needed In Underserved Areas To Decrease Health Impacts Of Warming Planet

Speaker 1: 00:00 With a heat wave scorching, the west environmentalist are looking for ways to cool things down. One way for urban areas to beat the heat is to consider the power of shade. Under the unsheltered sun. People can feel as much as 20 degrees warmer than an a shady area. The obvious way to provide this free and natural cooling is to line a neighborhood with trees, except quite often, that's not, what's happened a new article in national geographic outlines, both the necessity of shade for a warming planet and the unequal distribution of shady tree lined streets in our cities, including here in San Diego journey. Me is climate scientist, Alejandro Marunda author of the article, a shady divide, the national geographic magazines cover story for July, which is out today and Alejandro, welcome to the program. Speaker 2: 00:53 Thank you so much for having me. Let's talk Speaker 1: 00:55 For a minute about the power of shade. What can a shady environment help prevent when it comes to heat related illness? Speaker 2: 01:02 Shade is just such a wonderful thing. It's, it's one of the easiest ways we have to keep our bodies cool during a hot event. I mean, you probably have this experience, right? You can know exactly what it feels like to go stand under a tree and cool down. And then you go back out into the direct sun and it gets a lot harder to temperature regulate to keep your body at a comfortable temperature. And this is true for, for bodies. And this is true for cities as well. The more shade there is in an area, the less heat, the concrete, the asphalt, all of these different parts of the city ended up absorbing, which means that they can stay cooler when Speaker 1: 01:43 You are, do not have that shade cover. You have an increased likelihood of having some sort of illness because of heat. If it gets too hot for too long, isn't that right? Speaker 2: 01:55 Yeah, exactly. He is actually the most deadly natural disaster kind of natural disaster. We face every year in the U S it has huge public health impacts and can be incredibly devastating to people who are living in too much heat. And the disparity is really unequal. People of color are much more likely to suffer from all kinds of heat related illnesses and problems than wealthier people, often who are white right now Speaker 1: 02:22 In this article, in examining the benefits of trees and shade in cities, you do find a distinct divide between rich and poor across America, so that the amount of shade can almost be seen as an index of inequality. Yeah, Speaker 2: 02:37 So there's been some really, really fascinating research that's been happening for a long time, but that has kind of accelerated in the last few years, looking at the distribution of trees across different cities, all throughout the U S and there's this really clear pattern that emerges in areas that were formerly redlined or kind of denied investment from the federal government over many decades in the past, in a way that has continuing impacts today, there are a lot less trees and in neighborhoods that were not redlined, there are many more sometimes up to around 40% tree cover. So if you imagine the sky above you covered with, with leaves and trees, that's a lot, that's a totally different experience. And that has a really clear impact on temperatures. The differences between these formerly redlined areas and not redlined areas can be over pen degrees, Fahrenheit. A lot of your article Speaker 1: 03:35 Focuses on the city of Los Angeles. And what kind of statistics do we find when it comes to the shady divide throughout Los Angeles? For this Speaker 2: 03:43 Story, we spent, uh, quite a bit of time in different parts of south, south Los Angeles and, uh, other parts of the city as well. And in particular, we drove along Vermont avenue, which cuts south to north through the city. And in some of the neighborhoods that we started in, in south and south central LA, the tree cover was about 3%, uh, always kind of in the single digit. So that means there's basically nothing between you and, and the sunshine when you're standing on the street there. And that was mostly in neighborhoods that were formerly redlined and denied investment for many, many years and decades. And as you drove north toward, or the park, you started to encounter more and more trees, both on the sides of the street and in people's homes and backyards. And by the time you get up essentially to the park, there are these big, beautiful, big trees that are planted in the early 19 hundreds and have canopies that cover 80 feet at this point. So these big, giant, beautiful trees that create this incredibly comfortable shady environment beneath them. And we saw people lounging. We saw dogs playing, we saw lots of people out enjoying the space in a way that was just impossible to do, or much harder to do, and much more dangerous to do in the places we started, where there were less trees. Now, according Speaker 1: 05:11 To a study by the group American forests here in San Diego, we are among the 20 cities in the nation that need to plant more trees to achieve quote, tree equity. And that group says we need to add 4 million more trees. That seems like a tremendous amount. Is that the kind of mass planting that you'd like to see happen? Speaker 2: 05:32 Yeah, that's a lot of trees that would be a really big effort. Um, Los Angeles is in the process of planting tens of thousands right now, and, and that's taking a huge and concerted effort that I was so wonderfully pleased and, and lucky to get to see during our reporting for this story. I mean, I think trees and thinking about kind of the public spaces that we inhabit more generally and how to design those in a way that takes people's comfort and safety into account is a really important project for us now, especially as climate change kind of exacerbates in the future and its impacts become, become clearer. We often think of these spaces or, or over the decades, we've kind of seeded a lot of our public space, especially in California to cars. And that was a thing that definitely happened in LA, even in areas where there were trees in the past, often as streets got widened and parking spaces got added, public street, trees got taken out. And so anything we can do to kind of keep the trees we have in good shape and to add to that and to really prioritize people's experiences in public spaces, I think is it's a hugely important project, you Speaker 1: 06:50 Know, as temperatures continue to rise and of course, trees take time to grow and they need infrastructure to keep them more watered and healthy. Do we have time to make this plan work? Speaker 2: 07:01 Yeah, that's a great question. And one that I asked a lot of the people working on this question in Los Angeles and Miguel Vargas, who is one of the people I spent quite a bit of time with had a great answer to this. He was just thinking really far ahead. It's like climate change. Isn't going to stop. This is only going to become a bigger problem. And if we don't do it now, do we want to be looking at the world? We're going to inhabit in 30 years? Like I'm doing this for the future, even though we know it's a slow project. And I just thought that was such a wonderful way to look at the question. Like, of course this isn't going to be enough. Of course, this isn't going to have impacts tomorrow, but the way that we address climate change and its risks has to be forward-thinking, it has to take this really long view. And so the things that we do now, like plant trees, we'll have hopefully some really important benefits. 10, 20, 30, 40 years down the line. My guests Speaker 1: 08:00 A hundred Barun does peace. A shady divide is in the July issue of the national geographic magazine. It's available online@natgeo.com slash race and on newsstands and Alejandro. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. It was really great to talk with you.