A new mapping system will help Marion County prioritize where to plant more trees to help build climate resilience and alleviate flooding, heat illness and air pollution — especially in neglected neighborhoods.
American Forests, a non-profit conservation organizationpartnership with Keep Indianapolis Beautiful to build the free mapping program Tree Equity Score Analyzer to help identify areas without tree canopy and prioritize planting.
Planting more trees can have benefits that not only help with rising temperatures, but also capture and contain rainwater to help with flooding and help clean the air.
Joshua Simon of American Forests said the tool considers environmental benefits and socioeconomic indicators to help decide the most important places to plant trees. TESA can focus attention on areas lacking tree canopy and resources to help streamline planting efforts.
There’s a big push overall to increase urban tree canopies, but climate change doesn’t affect all communities the same way, Simon said.
“Communities of color and low-income communities are often at the forefront of the consequences of climate change,” Simon said. “And so one of the factors that we found that helps combat climate change is planting trees.”
Partnership with local experts
To help implement the tool in Indy, American Forests reached out to Keep Indianapolis Beautiful to help gather community input and involvement.
Carly Weidman, KIB’s vice president of stakeholder engagement, said Keep Indianapolis Beautiful is the city’s main tree planting contractor and typically plants about 3,000 trees a year.
TESA will allow KIB to raise awareness and allow people to engage in informed conversations about the value of trees.
“We were very excited to come on board and be part of this process,” Weidman said. “And it’s already been a useful tool for us to use internally, but also to start some of these conversations across the city and with community members.”
Why are trees important in Indy?
Indianapolis has already experienced record heat this year, and 2023 was the hottest year in the world, according to NOAA’s 174-Year Climate Record.
Stephanie Freeman-Day of Indiana University’s Institute for Environmental Resilience said the impacts of climate change, such as record heat and poor air quality, are increasing in urban areas and those effects are exacerbated by a lack of trees.
“Often, tree canopy is not distributed equitably in urban areas, and it tends to be that wealthier areas have denser tree canopies than areas where there are lower-income people or larger amounts of people of color,” he said. Freeman-Day.
The TESA tool is “super helpful” for a community in the tree planting planning process, Freeman-Day said.
Find the tool here: treeequityscore.org/analyzer/indianapolis
Karl Schneider is an environmental reporter for IndyStar. You can reach him at karl.schneider@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @karlstartswithk
IndyStar’s environmental reporting project is made possible by generous support from the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
This article originally appeared in the Indianapolis Star: Planting trees in Indy: New tool helps find areas in need
