New Online Tool Will Help Residents See the Benefits of the Philly Tree Plan

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Philly Tree Plan
Image via City of Philadelphia.
The Philly Tree Plan in Philadelphia is to plant more trees in various parts of the city.

Last summer, Philadelphia was selected as one of 14 U.S. cities to participate in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s urban heat island mapping project and a new tool will help quantify its benefits, writes Meir Rinde for Billy Penn at WHYY.

The Pennsylvania Nature Conservancy staff has developed a new website that will allow residents to see how the Philly Tree Plan might help their neighborhoods.

The website features two overlapping maps of the city. One reveals how bad the summer heat is on a detailed, block-by-block basis, and the other shows which areas throughout the city need tree-planting most.

Richard Johnson, the Nature Conservancy’s urban climate resilience manager, said that the information stored on the site is meant to help residents understand and shape the progress of the Philly Tree Plan. 

“Policymakers can use this now to more easily look at how it can inform decisions they’re making around cooling efforts in the city, and use it as an advocacy tool to drive investment where it’s needed the most,” said Johnson. 

Studies have shown that trees correlate with both income and shootings, as fewer trees are often planted in lower-wealth neighborhoods, and tree-deprived neighborhoods often see greater levels of violence. 

Read more about the Philly Tree Plan in Billy Penn at WHYY.

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