Arizona State University is leading a new effort to create community forestry plans in neighborhoods across the Valley. The Greater Phoenix Urban Forestry Accelerator is a three-year, $5 million project funded by the Inflation Reduction Act.
There are three main parts of the program: neighborhood workshops to design plans to get trees in the ground; internships and other initiatives to get people into green jobs and build up the workforce; and encouraging more businesses to enter the industry, in an effort to build the infrastructure that’ll allow urban forests to be sustainable in the long term.
Jen Clifton, assistant director of community economic development at ASU’s Walton Sustainability Solutions Service, joined The Show to discuss, starting with some of the anticipated challenges in terms of getting the trees planted.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Jen, what are some of the challenges you're anticipating in terms of getting the trees planted that you need to get planted to do what you want to do here?
JEN CLIFTON: Yeah, our neighborhood workshops are oriented precisely around, around this. There are a lot of challenges to planting trees. Some of them are simply knowing where, where plantable areas are, which are publicly maintained, which are privately maintained. And so that's one place where we're starting. But there are other challenges, including like underground utility lines or getting water to the trees, ensuring their long-term survivability.
And so a lot of the work on the planning side is to discover those challenges in detail, like specifically how they play out in a, in a given neighborhood because they don't play out the same everywhere. And so that's one part of this. And then on the workforce development side, we are looking to bring folks into, and train them, into green, green jobs, green positions to support the full life cycle of a, of a tree; ranging from like growing trees, water conservation, landscape design and tree care for their long-term viability.
BRODIE: Is there currently a shortage of people to do some of those jobs and maybe work within the, the urban forestry sector?
CLIFTON: There is. There's a, I think, it's a 2022 study by the USDA in partnership with the Arizona Nursery Association and Arizona Landscape Contractors Association, who are also partners on this award, that shows that there were 22,000 people working in the industry at that time and there was a huge labor shortage. It was the number one reason that businesses could not expand at that time. And our friends in those organizations say that it's only gotten worse since.
BRODIE: Is there a sense as to why that is? I mean, I can imagine there might be any number of reasons, but are there some in particular that you're able to address and that you've recognized in this particular industry?
CLIFTON: Some of it has to do just with working outside. Like it is hard to work outside here. Thriving wages is also a concern of ours. And then there's a lot of entrepreneurship in this area.
Folks come in, but they may not have, they may have sort of homegrown skills, but not kind of industry-recognized skills and we also know that there with some training that they could, there's a market edge. And so folks could, could sell themselves and their and their businesses if they have some of the training that we're looking to provide.
BRODIE: I know that equity is a pretty important factor in what you're doing here and I'm wondering, how you try to make sure and maybe how you try to target the specific neighborhoods that are really maybe in need of more trees and more shade that, you know, really don't have it like, how do you, how do you try to make that happen?
CLIFTON: We started with talking with our municipal partners and they were looking at kind of heat vulnerability, mapping tree canopy coverage, where are our hottest neighborhoods, our least shaded neighborhoods. We talked with community partners about kind of previous engagement that we could build on. Where have there already been conversations where neighbors already saying that they need trees.
We've already mapped 2,066 locations where residents are saying they need trees or shade or water stations or cooling stations. And so that's, we're bringing that into these workshops and trying to and trying to build on that. We've, in partnership with the USDA, this is a Justice 40 initiative, and so we're also using their, the EPA's climate and economic justice screening tool. And so it's bringing in, not only climate and environmental kind of inequities over time, but also education and economic indicators. And so we're concentrating, trying to concentrate the social and health and environmental and economic benefits of trees into the neighborhoods that need it most.
BRODIE: So this is obviously not the first effort around the Valley to increase the, the urban shade canopy and plant trees and even, you know, help particular neighborhoods who are maybe lower income and have less shade than than others.
I'm wondering what to you is different about what you're doing than some of these earlier efforts, which have had some kind of mixed success and had left some people frustrated with maybe the lack of tangible success.
CLIFTON: Yeah, there's been, there, there have been a lot of efforts across the Valley, and one key difference from, for example, the, the listening sessions in the city of, the city of Phoenix is that we are trying to get very tangible and operational. And so kind of looking at street by street, where is it easier to plant, harder to plant, hardest to plant in relation to some of those constraints we were naming earlier.
Where's their public right of way, where is it mostly going to be on private property? What's the kind of typology of the, the street? Are there even plantable areas? Where are there parks and public, public places?
So we're trying to get very, very detailed and operational so that it's actually useful to residents and community organizations on the ground and to our municipal partners. And we're working from the get to with our municipal partners to tie it to real timelines, real funding. And so there is a planning component on ours, tied to real dollars and implementation on the city of Phoenix's Inflation Reduction Act money.
BRODIE: What are you hearing at some of the listening sessions from people? Like, I'm curious how engaged on this issue residents of Phoenix and the Valley are.
CLIFTON: They are very engaged and we just had a workshop in Linda Park. There was a lot of, a lot of energy in the room, a lot of, a lot of buzz. Neighborhood leaders were in the room and what was really helpful is there were, there were residents who've lived in a neighborhood for 20 years or 50 years and they are talking like they know intimately like where trees are needed and where the we're kind of paying attention to the the destinations that people are trying to get to.
Are they going to schools, are they going to clinics? Where are they trying to get to transit or or work and what are the specific routes that we're taking? So we're not trying to make a plan that creates kind of blanket coverage of an entire neighborhood, but we're trying to be really strategic, where do folks most need trees as they're going about as they're going about their days.
And I think the, the big thing is that like we know that urban nature is a huge protective factor. Planting right trees in the right places, like, not only does it create a shade and so protection from direct exposure to the sun, but it also has a significant impact on radiant temperature. Radiant temperature is actually what we're feeling. Our experience of heat as we're walking around. And a well-treed neighborhood can impact radiant temperature by 20 degrees or more. And so it's a huge cooling effect for folks in the neighborhood.
