The City Council Tuesday unanimously approved a five-year urban forestry plan for San Diego that’s designed to, among other things, increase the amount of shade provided by trees.
The initiative is part of the city’s plan to address climate change, where one of the major goals is to increase San Diego’s tree canopy from the current estimate of 13 percent to 15 percent by 2020. By 2035, the climate change plan calls for 35 percent coverage.
Backers said the additional shade would result in lowered residential energy consumption.
The urban forestry plan outlines more than 65 actions that can be taken by various city departments, including updating an inventory of trees in the public right-of-way — such as along streets. The last tally was conducted around 15 years ago.
City staff estimates that around 200,000 trees and another 48,000 palms line city streets.
Councilman Scott Sherman said he worked as a landscape contractor many years ago, at a time when there wasn’t much understanding of the impact of different types of trees that are planted.
“It was basically `OK, I want something that produces red leaves in the fall’ and stick something over there and not pay attention to the roots, what they do to the infrastructure, how big it’s going to get, how much water it’s going to take,” Sherman said.
“This really takes us a step in the right direction — we’re actually going to have a plan, we know what we’re going to put in the ground, we know how it works,” he said. “We’re going to be thinking down the road. In the long run, this will save us money because we won’t have to repair streets, dig up roots and (remove) trees that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
He noted that numerous trees fell in San Diego over the past several days when a series of powerful storms moved through the region. Some of them were non-native eucalyptus, which have shallow roots.
The urban forestry plan also calls for improving the care of trees and coordinating management.
–City News Service
