A New Roadmap for Urban Tree Planting

When summer heat intensifies in cities across the world, the consequences extend beyond discomfort, they affect public health, energy costs, and equity. A new study co-authored by Yale School of the Environment research scientists offers a roadmap for making urban tree planting more strategic and equitable.

The study, recently published in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, introduces a data-driven framework that could help cities decide where to plant new trees so they provide the most heat relief and other benefits to vulnerable communities.

“In practice the tool offers specific guidance of where to prioritize tree planting to reverse the trend of increasing urban heat to have the greatest impact on the most vulnerable communities,” said co-author, Colleen Murphy-Dunning,  executive director of the Hixon Center for Urban Sustainability and the Urban Resources Initiative.

Urban heat isn’t evenly distributed. Long-standing patterns of under-investment and land use have left many lower-income neighborhoods with fewer trees and more paved surfaces, amplifying the heat island effect.

“Some of the patterns were previously known, such as the lower tree canopy in neighborhoods that are also known to be lower income,” Dunning noted. “What was revealing about the trend of neighborhoods with fewer trees, lower income, and hotter temperatures was identifying where trees could or could not be planted. For example — a finding from one of the hotter communities was that there is more surface area in parking lots than in parks and schoolyards combined. It further clarifies why this community is so hot, and also why it is harder to resolve.”

By pairing high-resolution heat data with demographic and land-use information, the team developed a prioritization tool that can guide city planners, nonprofits, and local governments in targeting the most impactful planting sites. Rather than treating canopy cover as the only metric, the model integrates constraints like available land, competing infrastructure, and social vulnerability.

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“This research shows that strategies to increase tree cover require considering ease of implementation in addition to identifying where a city is hot,” said study co-author Karen Seto, the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science and director of the Hixon Center for Urban Sustainability.

While the study provides a framework, the authors emphasized that real-world implementation requires local engagement and long-term commitment. Planting trees is only the first step, maintaining them, ensuring equitable distribution of resources, and integrating community voices are equally important.

“The findings suggest that practitioners need to consider the tradeoffs between prioritizing equity benefits and prioritizing ease of implementation when planting trees,” Seto said.

The study also highlights structural barriers: In many neighborhoods, the areas that are most in need of cooling are dominated by impervious surfaces, such as parking lots, roadways, and industrial zones, where trees can’t easily take root.

As cities confront more frequent heat waves and intensifying climate impacts, the authors note tools like this offer a roadmap for both mitigation and adaptation. They help ensure that tree-planting initiatives — often celebrated as feel-good sustainability measures — are targeted where they matter most.