John Farner, a leading expert on water, land use, and agriculture, has been named executive director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. Farner will lead the Babbitt Center’s work to promote the integration of land and water management in the United States and around the world.

Farner, who joined the Babbitt Center in September, was previously global chief sustainability officer of the precision agriculture technology company Netafim. He succeeds founding director Jim Holway, who is retiring after leading the Babbitt Center since its launch by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in 2017.

“The Babbitt Center has established itself as a thought leader at the nexus of land use planning and water management in the Colorado River Basin under Jim Holway’s leadership, with a focus on connecting and supporting the communities that steward this essential resource,” said George W. McCarthy, president of the Lincoln Institute. “John Farner brings experience and perspectives to this role that will help us deepen our roots in the region, even as we expand our knowledge base and global influence.”

Farner has spent more than 20 years promoting solutions to global environmental challenges, and has addressed the United States Congress, the United Nations, and various other national and global organizations. Before joining Netafim, he served as head of sustainability, public affairs, and strategic initiatives for the US-based Irrigation Association, where he was the chief advocate and spokesperson for the industry before national and international policymakers, as well as NGOs. At Netafim, Farner oversaw initiatives related to agriculture, water replenishment, and corporate social responsibility.

“Water is the lifeblood of the West, and the decisions we make today will have lasting impacts well into our future,” Farner said. “I’m thrilled to be joining such a talented team as we embrace the challenge of making a positive impact on our land, water, and livelihoods. The spotlight on the Colorado River Basin is growing, and the Babbitt Center has proven to be the best resource for tools and solutions that help communities secure their water future. I’m excited to build upon our efforts and expand our reach, sharing what we’ve learned with others facing similar challenges in the United States and around the world.”

Since its founding, the Babbitt Center has developed tools and best practices to support community-led management of land and water resources in the Colorado River Basin, which is dependent on one of the most heavily used and overallocated rivers in the world. It works throughout the seven Colorado River Basin states, binationally across the Basin into Mexico, and with Native American Tribes, helping communities become more resilient and building an exchange of transformative ideas with other arid and semiarid regions.

“Effective land and water management is critically important, especially as the climate changes,” McCarthy noted. “The Babbitt Center is testing innovative new methodologies and approaches for both urban and rural communities, and we’re ready to share these ideas broadly as we help build capacity and resilience in the Basin and beyond.”

Learn more about the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy.

Climate change is no longer knocking—it kicked down the door this summer. Wildfires destroyed more than 33 million acres of forest in Canada’s worst-ever fire season. Vermont was flooded by a 100-year storm for the second time in 12 years, while a different deluge left five dead outside of Philadelphia. Temperatures in Phoenix crested 110ºF for 31 consecutive days, failing to dip below 90ºF at any time for more than two straight weeks. And as deadly bouts of flood, fire, and ferocious heat erupted all over the planet, we lived through the hottest day in recorded history—a global record that was promptly broken the very next day, and again the next—in what scientists say was likely the hottest month on Earth in 120,000 years.    

Given the urgency of the climate crisis, every workable solution to limit further warming and to transition our economies off of fossil fuels deserves exploration. This dire situation demands technological advances, of course; indeed, technology has alleviated so much human suffering, it’s tempting to heave all our hopes squarely upon its back, like desperate sports fans expectantly looking to their team’s star player to pull off just one more spectacular play as the clock runs out.  

But we can’t overlook the importance of allowing and encouraging nature to heal its own ecosystems as part of our climate strategy. And nature’s toolbox can be surprisingly effective. 

Trees are often touted for the many small miracles they provide, especially in urban areas, as they cool streets, clean air, and reduce storm runoff while pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But how many people know that microscopic forest fungi process twice as much carbon as the United States emits each year? Or that a salt marsh can sequester 10 times as much carbon per acre as a forest? Or that restoring even a small fraction of bison populations across parts of the American prairie could help those grasslands absorb more carbon than all of Great Britain emits in a year?  

These are not miracle cures for the climate crisis, of course; none of these tools will slow climate change on its own without a dramatic reduction of fossil fuel use. But all are surprisingly powerful, relatively simple, and low-risk strategies we could be using more often, in more places. After all, both an expensive cordless drill and a five-dollar screwdriver can help you build something—but only if you get to work using them.  

Marsh Magic 

Hundreds of millions of people around the world live near a salt marsh, or a similar coastal ecosystem of mangroves or seagrass. These seaside sanctuaries offer quiet beauty and attract abundant wildlife; they also absorb flood water and wave energy during storms, reducing damage to adjacent communities by up to 20 percent. But many people don’t realize that these unassuming tidal wetlands are also busy trapping carbon at an astonishing rate—10 to 40 times faster than a forest.   

There are two reasons salt marshes, mangroves, and seagrass beds are such powerful carbon sinks. One is that their vegetation grows very quickly, says Hilary Stevens, coastal resilience manager at Restore America’s Estuaries. “There’s a lot of photosynthesis, a lot of pulling of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,” she explains. 

But the real magic of the marsh is its salty, soggy soil. When that vegetation dies, it falls to the bottom of the marsh and gets buried in a network of roots and sediment, where it will remain indefinitely saturated with briny water. That anaerobic environment slows or even stops the decomposition process, allowing the carbon in the plants to stay stashed in the soil for hundreds or even thousands of years. This underwater vault is known as “blue carbon.” 

While forests are also excellent at trapping carbon, Stevens says, they’re more likely to release it, through events ranging from wildfire to decomposition. But the carbon in marsh soil “can remain there for centuries if that area remains inundated and undisturbed.”  

Of course, that’s a big “if” when there are humans around. The United States alone loses an estimated 80,000 acres of coastal wetlands each year due to a combination of development and sea level rise. Even many surviving marshes have been ditched and drained over the years, allowing air to reach the long-submerged soil, and turning powerful carbon sinks into leaky CO2 emitters.   

“If you disturb an inundated soil, if you allow it to drain—whether that’s because you filled it, ditched it, diked it, drained it, converted it to agriculture, or paved it and put up a parking lot—all of that organic material is at risk of being rereleased into the atmosphere,” Stevens says. Centuries worth of carbon can then escape fairly quickly, so preventing further loss of healthy coastal wetlands is critical from a climate standpoint.  

That’s a growing challenge as ocean levels rise more quickly. Salt marshes can sometimes migrate upland as rising seas encroach, says Cynthia Dittbrenner, director of coastal and natural resources at Massachusetts-based conservation organization The Trustees—but only if there’s room to do so, and the walls and roads of human development often make that impossible. And although they’re actually quite good at adapting to slowly rising seas—because a healthy salt marsh naturally builds in elevation each year as its grasses die off and accumulate on the bottom and daily tidal inflows deliver new sediment—scientists fear that natural process of accretion can’t keep up with the unnatural and accelerating rate of sea level rise driven by human-caused climate change. 

What’s more, a lot of our remaining marshes aren’t particularly healthy.  

In New England, for example, colonial farmers viewed salt marshes as a source of hay for livestock and horses, and set about draining them to ease harvesting. To this day, most of the region’s marshes are still ribboned with man-made ditches dug hundreds of years ago. Later, the long-neglected ditches clogged, creating pools of standing water that prompted 20th-century mosquito-prevention squads to dig them out once again. But a drained marsh doesn’t build elevation as it should; in fact, it sinks, because the organic matter in the soil starts decomposing more rapidly as it interacts with the air.  

“A legacy of 300 years of us ditching the marsh has led to lowering the water table, and that marsh soil is now being exposed to oxygen,” Dittbrenner says. “It’s aerated, it’s decomposing quickly, and it’s actually sinking . . . so we have to heal the hydrology to fix that natural process.”  

There are simple and cost-effective ways to restore ditch-drained salt marshes. One method, piloted by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, is to cut marsh grass along the edge of a ditch, rake the hay into the trench, and secure it to the bottom with twine and stakes. “When the tides come in, that hay slows the water down and encourages sediment to drop out,” Dittbrenner says, and that slowly refills the ditch. “If you do that over a series of three to four years, you’ve filled the ditch up, and now it can grow salt marsh hay,” and tidewater lingers longer as it naturally would.  

The Trustees implemented that technique on 85 acres in the Great Marsh north of Boston, and the results were so promising that the organization secured funding—and hard-won permits—to expand the restoration effort across all of the 1,400 acres it manages there.  

Another opportunity for marsh restoration is in places where a road or bridge has cut off part of a marsh from incoming seawater. “The area upstream of that essentially becomes freshwater, because it’s not getting enough tidal influence,” Stevens says. Soil inundated with freshwater is still slow to release carbon dioxide, she notes, but it does emit a lot of methane—a much more potent greenhouse gas—because it hosts a different set of microbes not found in brackish or saltwater. “If you can restore tidal flow to those areas, there’s a massive carbon benefit to that.”   

One such effort underway is the Herring River Restoration Project in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where a dike built in 1909 cut off tidal flow to what had been a stable estuary for 2,000 years. A new bridge with large tide gates will allow ocean water to return—gradually, at first—along with herring and other fish, tidal sediment, and native saltwater seagrasses. The project will return 677 acres of freshwater wetland to salt marsh, which the US Geological Survey calculates will reduce emissions by an equivalent of nearly 3,000 tons of carbon per year.  

With less room to migrate, smaller, narrow “fringe” marshes are more at risk from rising seas. But they can “attenuate quite a bit of wave energy,” Dittbrenner says, making them useful storm defenses for coastal communities, and they can be protected—or even created—with simple, natural methods. Installing coir logs (made of coconut husk fiber) or mesh bags stuffed with oyster shells a few meters offshore, for example, can help protect and grow the marsh behind it. “It slows the wave energy so much that it allows sediment to build up,” she says, until grass can grow on it. In one project, Dittbrenner says, researchers were able to extend a stretch of fringe marsh 10 feet further into the water in less than a year using old lobster traps to slow the waves and capture sediment.  

Stevens is now working on a project in the Gulf Coast that uses recycled oyster shells from restaurants to build artificial reefs, creating new habitat for live oysters. In addition to increasing food security for the community (oysters, she notes, are one of the most climate-friendly ways to grow protein, requiring no irrigation, fertilizer, or feed), the reefs create a breakwater to stabilize the shoreline and protect adjacent communities.  

But halting the continued loss of coastal wetlands would have the biggest climate impact of all. “We would love to see better protection for existing blue carbon ecosystems,” Stevens says, along with a more coordinated government approach—two pillars of Restore America’s Estuaries’ Blue Carbon National Action Plan.  

At the same time, Stevens says, there’s a need for permitting reform, so groups like RAE and The Trustees can more easily restore degraded marshes; it can be difficult to reuse dredged sediment, for example, even though it’s a key ingredient to help sinking marshes. “Some of those regulations, because of the way they’re worded, actually inhibit restoration, because they make it so difficult to operate in the coastal zone,” she says. Such rules were put in place with the best of intentions, she adds, but that was decades ago. “And we’ve learned a lot since then.”  

Forest-Feeding Fungi 

Neither plant nor animal (though more closely related to the latter), fungi are their own biological kingdom, comprising about 3.5 million different species. Microscopic fungi are everywhere—all over our bodies, on plants, in the air we breathe—and without them, says Jennifer Bhatnagar, associate professor of biology at Boston University, most of the biological processes on earth would cease. They’re especially important in forests.  

“One of the main roles of those fungi in forests is to decompose dead plant leaves, roots, and other plant parts, and other dead microorganisms, and most of that activity happens in the soil,” she says. In doing so, they release elements like nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur back into the soil in a form that plants can use.  

But there’s a group that’s particularly crucial to forest health: mycorrhizal fungi, which live on the roots of plants in one of the oldest symbiotic relationships found in nature.  

When a mycorrhizal fungus colonizes a plant by growing on or inside of its root cells, the plant will send up to 30 percent of its carbon—in the form of sugar, produced through photosynthesis—from its leaves down to its roots to feed the fungus. To return the favor, “the fungus will use that carbon to extend out into the soil and absorb those nutrients that are being decomposed by other fungi,” Bhatnagar says, and give them to the plant. The carbon ends up feeding not just the fungus, but also nearby microbes, which help sequester it in the soil.  

“This is the main way that plant carbon gets from above ground to below ground on the surface of the earth,” Bhatnagar says. “It’s a really important way that we’re able to take carbon out of the atmosphere and put it into the earth—and it can remain there for quite a long time.”  

A study published in June estimated that an astounding 13.12 gigatons of carbon fixed by plants each year is allocated to mycorrhizal fungi, at least temporarily. It’s not yet known how much of that carbon is retained in the soil long-term, but even half of that would represent more than the annual carbon-equivalent emissions of the United States—and the researchers suggested that fungi could be essential to reaching net zero.   

Mycorrhizal fungi networks can help boost a forest’s carbon intake above ground as well. Ecologist Colin Averill, lead scientist at ​​ETH Zurich’s Crowther Lab and the founder of the carbon removal start-up Funga, says it’s helpful to think about the microbial environment of soil the way we conceive of the human gut biome. “Each of us has this incredibly biodiverse community of bacteria in our gut, and this has profound implications for our health,” Averill says—and a forest is no different.  

To learn what a healthy forest microbiome looks like, he and his team compared soil samples from hundreds of locations across Europe where foresters had been tracking trees for decades. They found that the mix of fungi living on the tree roots in the sampled forests was linked to a threefold variation in how fast the trees grew. Put another way, Averill says, “You could have two pine forests in Central Europe sitting side by side, experiencing the same climate, growing in the same soils. But if one of them has the right community of fungi on its roots, it can be growing up to three times as fast as that adjacent forest,” and removing more carbon from the atmosphere. 

This can have a particularly profound impact on the reforestation of former agricultural land or other degraded landscapes, where, after decades of farming, grazing, or mining, Averill says, “The microbes that live in that soil no longer look anything like the microbes in a forest.”  

Averill partnered with a nonprofit in Wales that was reforesting an abandoned sheep pasture to conduct an experiment, adding a handful of soil from a healthy forest to some of the saplings as they were planted. “It’s a very low-tech procedure,” he says. “But it’s not just any dirt. It’s dirt from a forest that our analyses identified as harboring intact wild, biodiverse, high-performing fungal communities. And the early results there show we can accelerate forest regeneration by 30 to 70 percent if we co-reintroduce the below-ground microbiology.”   

Similar experiments around the world that introduced healthy microbial networks to degraded forest or grassland soil have shown a 64 percent average increase in biomass growth, Averill says—though the results vary widely. “Some places are unresponsive, some are incredibly responsive,” he says. “But basically what we’re learning is that there’s something special about wild microbiology that can be lost, and it can have this enormous effect if you reintroduce it.”  

Letting Wildlife Go Wild 

For another way to accelerate forest growth and carbon uptake, we turn to a different biological kingdom: animalia.

A 2023 study led by Yale ecology professor Oswald J. Schmitz found that protecting and restoring populations of animal species can supercharge the carbon capture capabilities of their respective ecosystems. This can enhance the total amount of CO2 naturally absorbed and stored by as much as 6.41 gigatons per year worldwide—or more than 14 trillion pounds of CO2. 

“People assume that because animals are rare in ecosystems, they don’t matter to ecosystem functioning,” Schmitz says. But the idea of “trophic cascades”—in which predators, by preying on herbivores, have a ripple effect on vegetation—made him think otherwise. “If predators can have a profound effect on plants, and we know herbivores can have a profound effect on plants, then surely they should also have an effect on carbon cycling and nutrient cycling.”  

They do, and the carbon impact of healthy wildlife populations can be tremendous in all kinds of ecosystems. 

Endangered forest elephants in central Africa, for example, spread the seeds of trees and woody plants, and trample and devour vegetative undergrowth, helping carbon-dense overstory trees grow faster and bigger. Restoring wild elephant populations within the region’s 79 national parks and protected areas—about 537,000 square kilometers of tropical rainforest—could help capture an estimated 13 megatons of additional CO2 per year, or 13 million metric tons.  

In the ocean, migrating marine fish eat algae near the surface, and their fecal matter drops to the ocean floor or nourishes photosynthesizing phytoplankton. Fish also help the ocean lock up carbon as they rid their bodies of excess salt through the production of calcite, a form of calcium carbonate. “Calcite is a way of binding up salt,” Schmitz says, “but it’s also a carbon-based unit.” The hard pellets sink to the ocean bottom, and don’t break down easily. Marine fish currently help the oceans absorb 5.5 gigatons of CO2 annually—without getting explicit credit for it—and Schmitz says overharvesting fish or catching them in deeper waters could jeopardize that enormous underwater carbon vault.  

Predators like sea otters, meanwhile, help carbon-absorbent kelp forests thrive by keeping seaweed-munching sea urchins in check. Gray wolves and sharks create similar trophic cascades in boreal forests and coral reefs, where they keep the populations of their smaller herbaceous prey in balance.

In the arctic, organic matter in the ground doesn’t decay and release methane as long as the permafrost stays frozen. Caribou and muskoxen help ensure that by trampling arctic snowpack, creating a cold crust of compressed snow that forms an insulative barrier over the permafrost. Meanwhile, just by eating and trampling shrubs, they help the snow reflect more solar radiation. “If the animals aren’t there, the shrubs grow above the snowpack level, the sun shines on the vegetation and, especially in the spring, that vegetation holds the solar radiation,” Schmitz says. “It doesn’t reflect it the way snow would, and it warms up the soil a lot faster.”  

And in North America, where white settlers all but wiped out the more than 30 million bison that once roamed the prairies, just 2 percent of that animal’s one-time numbers remain, confined to about 1 percent of its historical range. Because heavy herds of grazing bison help grasslands retain carbon in the soil, restoring their numbers across even a small fraction of the landscape—less than 16 percent of a handful of prairies where human conflict would be minimal—could help those ecosystems store an additional 595 megatons of CO2 annually, the study found.  

That’s more than 10 percent of all the CO2 emitted by the United States in 2021. “We could restore up to 2 million bison in parts of the prairie states where they’re going to have very little conflict with people, and in doing that, you will be able to take up enough carbon to offset all of the prairie states’ fossil fuel emissions,” Schmitz explains.  

These findings could have a meaningful impact on land and marine conservation efforts, says Jim Levitt, director of the International Land Conservation Network (ILCN) at the Lincoln Institute. “This is not your everyday piece of natural climate solution research,” says Levitt, who was not involved in the study. “I think this is a major insight.”  

For one thing, it points to the need for larger, more interconnected wild spaces. “It’s not just land protection, it’s also stewardship across big corridors, large landscape conservation,” Levitt says. Animals need huge swaths of functionally intact ecosystems to recover their historical numbers and species diversity, but they can rebound rapidly given the right conditions.  

“If you give nature a chance to reestablish itself, it’s really efficient at doing so,” Levitt says, noting that many US National Forests were once abandoned lands denuded of their timber. Now those swaths of forest are essential tools for absorbing atmospheric carbon.  

“Not only do the trees sequester carbon, but the soil, the animals, the insect life, and the mycorrhizal networks under the ground, they’re all sequestering carbon, and they all depend on a healthy chain of trophic networks,” Levitt says. “So there is utility, even related to the survival of our species, in having wild animals on open space. It’s not just beautiful, it keeps the carbon cycle in tune.” 

As a resource hub connecting private and civic conservation groups across cultural and political boundaries, Levitt says ILCN has an important role to play in supporting the establishment of the type of linked, protected environments that promote greater biodiversity. “You really need large, interconnected, protected spaces to get to truly rich ecosystems,” he says. “And what networks can do is make land conservation contagious sociologically—meaning, if your next-door neighbor has conserved his property, you’re more likely to do the same thing.” ILCN also supports the global 30×30 effort, an agreement among more than 190 countries to work toward protecting 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans by 2030. 

With that ambitious global conservation goal in mind, Schmitz contends that the recent study demands a shift in perspective, and an embrace of more dynamic landscapes. “We can’t just do it in parks and protected areas, there just isn’t enough [protected space],” Schmitz says. “So we actually have to think about working landscapes.”  

And that’s where human-wildlife conflict can occur, as wild animals trample crops, for example. To ease that tension, Schmitz suggests paying landowners for lost livelihoods as well as for the carbon they’re offsetting. “If we’re going to ask people to live with these animals, we should at least compensate them . . . but also we should inspire them to think differently about being stewards of their lands,” he adds. “Instead of having cattle ranchers in the western prairies, maybe there are some people who’d think of themselves better as carbon ranchers, who are willing to bring bison back, and we should actually pay them for the service that provides.” 

Jon Gorey is a staff writer for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

Lead image: Coastal salt marsh in Virginia. Credit: McKinneMike via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.

While pursuing her doctorate at the University of Arizona, Neha Gupta participated in the Babbitt Center’s Dissertation Fellowship Program, which assists PhD students whose research focuses on integrating land and water policy to advance water sustainability and resilience. Gupta is now a joint assistant research professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. We caught up with her to talk about climate change, urban stormwater innovations, and her favorite cli-fi novels; this interview has been edited for length and clarity.

JON GOREY: What is the focus of your work, and how did your fellowship help advance that research?

NEHA GUPTA: A lot of my work is focused on urban hydrology, the use of stormwater as a resource, especially in arid regions, and collaborative approaches to water resource planning. I received the fellowship at the beginning of 2020—as we know, a very chaotic time in global history—so not only did it help me get across the finish line with my dissertation, but it gave me some stability in that time as well. Since then, I’ve engaged with people at the Babbitt Center and am working a little more closely with them; I got involved with being a small-group facilitator for some of the exploratory scenario planning work that they’re doing with workshops in Cochise County, and I point to the center as a place the students I’m working with and mentoring might want to partner with or eventually work for.

JG: What are you working on now, and what are you interested in working on next?

NG: I’m especially focused on green stormwater infrastructure. I’m involved in a lot of collaborative projects with the City of Tucson, the Pima County Flood Control District, and other water managers across the state. I’m also working on a statewide water reliability planning effort with the Department of Water Resources. So I’m helping manage that project at a high level, and also specifically looking at opportunities to use stormwater to recharge groundwater and support water resource needs in Arizona as things start to look a bit tighter across the Colorado River Basin.

In Tucson, we have a program called Storm to Shade that’s focused on maximizing green infrastructure, with a community outreach component and a maintenance and monitoring component. That program involves a couple of different agencies, and I work a lot with them. So it’s not just myself working in urban hydrology, but we have other people in the university thinking about it from a social, community-based perspective with an equity lens, we have landscape architects, and we all try to knit our work together . . . because stormwater really sits at the intersection of landscape architecture, urban planning, hydrology, soil health, equity, and more socially based components and perspectives.

JG: A tropical storm just dropped months’ worth of rain on Southern California in a few hours. Is that the kind of situation where some of that extreme rainfall could be collected, or is that more of a disaster than an opportunity?

NG: We’re trying to make it both. That’s exactly the kind of work that we’re trying to focus on. When we do get these bigger storms, a lot of that water is considered a threat to property. But that’s excess water that can be harnessed and used to support plants, which can then help address the urban heat island effect, and can create microclimate benefits in different areas of the state. They call it urban enhanced runoff, and that can be used for groundwater recharge projects. It’s really about treating water in a more holistic sense. And thinking about equity across an urban region, the wealthier areas tend to have more canopy and lower temperatures. So capturing urban stormwater is a resources benefit, but it can address a whole other slew of issues.

JG: When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?

NG: There isn’t a lot that keeps me up at night. We know that we live in a water-stressed region. It’s been this way for a long time, and it’s really about having creative ways to move water around to meet various water demands. We know that we live in an area that’s getting hotter. We know that we live in an area that’s going to be experiencing more unpredictable precipitation, whether it’s record-breaking dry years or record-breaking wet years. So I think to stay in this space in the long run, you can’t let those things keep you up at night. Otherwise you won’t get any sleep to show up the next day.

I think the hardest part, or maybe the thing that does keep me up at night, is the heat and the temperatures. Those probably cause the most immediate threat to life. But that’s why we’re focusing on ways to increase and support the urban canopy.

I’m very much a solutions-focused person, and we know these problems are not new. They’re just getting bigger and more pressing and unpredictable. But there are a lot of things we can do to address them. It really requires us working collaboratively.

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately?

NG: I am a pretty big fan of the “cli-fi” or climate fiction genre. On the more hopeful end, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson is a great exercise in thinking about not only some of the terrible things that might happen as a result of climate change—and while this book came out a few years ago, we see some of these things showing up in the news now; the first chapter starts out with a heat wave in India that’s above the wet bulb temperature that humans can survive in—but also a lot of different environmental strategies. A book I recently finished that is on the more concerning end, but that I really enjoyed—it read like a movie—was called The Displacements by Bruce Holsinger. In that book, a Category 6 hurricane hits Miami, and essentially wipes it off the map. He really links together a lot of our existing societal struggles, but in the context of natural disasters that are amplified by climate change. So they’re kind of two sides of the genre—one’s a little more hopeful, the other a little more concerning—but I think they help seed the imagination and help us look a few steps out and wrap our heads around an overall slow-moving crisis that shows its face most visibly in natural disasters. I really appreciate a good story—but a story that can also help me with my own work and wrapping my head around the bigger picture.

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Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Image: University of Arizona Assistant Research Professor and former Babbitt Fellow Neha Gupta. Credit: Courtesy photo.

As cities grow and the struggle to address climate change and its effects continues to mount, the importance of the urban tree has also grown. Efforts to cultivate urban tree canopies abound and are popular with policymakers and the public alike. Trees provide much-needed shade, remove air pollution, absorb carbon, and even increase property values. But boosting the urban treescape has one element that often gets overlooked: It’s one thing to plant a lot of trees—but it’s something else to maintain them.

Technology has long played a role in efforts to track, map, and quantify the big-picture impacts of urban treescapes, from the environmental to the economic, a topic covered in this column in 2018. But new technologies have emerged and evolved since then, and some of the most intriguing are focused not just on high-level policy impacts but on the crucial issue of long-term maintenance. One specific example: adequate and timely watering, especially for younger trees, must be part of planning if the urban tree population is to endure.

Increasingly, cities are leveraging sophisticated tree-data tools to encourage and enable citizen engagement with urban tree maintenance, and in some cases even directly involve citizens in caring for the canopy.  

Consider a set of ongoing projects originating with CityLAB Berlin, a tech innovation nonprofit that applies data to urban problems. In recent years, Berlin, one of the more tree-rich cities in Europe, lost 20 percent of its trees thanks to high temperatures and a dearth of rain. That’s partly because monitoring and maintaining individual trees can be a complicated and heavy burden for municipal governments. So in 2020, CityLAB launched Gieß den Kiez (Water the Neighborhood), a digital platform that made government tree data available and accessible to the public. This made it possible for citizens to learn about local tree-watering needs—and to commit to helping out. “The application was developed based on the needs of our community,” said Yannick Müller, the organization’s head of strategic partnerships, via email.

The amount of data already available was a revelation: government projects had previously detailed and mapped hundreds of thousands of trees. CityLab combined this with other data, such as rainfall figures. The result is a new digital map with data on more than half a million trees, indicating watering levels and dates, cross-matched with watering needs based on age and species. Feedback and insights from a highly tree-engaged chunk of the citizenry helped shape the platform’s subsequent development. Some individuals had already essentially adopted, and independently started maintaining, particular urban trees. “They feel like it’s their own tree,” CityLab Berlin manager Julia Zimmermann told an interviewer. Citizens also had specific ideas about utilizing the city’s existing water pump system and making it more accessible. 

“A chat tool enables interaction between users, groups, and initiatives and allowed us to communicate and collect feedback,” Müller explained. Aside from resolving smaller bugs, this inspired new features, like one that displays the location and status of water pumps. It also helped support the designation of “caretakers” for specific trees, who commit to monitoring and watering on a regular basis. “This small added feature allows citizens to make use of their resources in a more targeted manner,” he said.

In 2021, the city of Leipzig adopted the tool, and a few more German municipalities have followed, according to Müller. User numbers are increasing continually, with more than 3,500 registered citizen-caretakers now watching over 7,500 adopted trees.

That said, the efforts of Gieß den Kiez remain an adjunct to public policy, not formally absorbed into official government urban tree maintenance plans. “However, the platform succeeds in raising awareness for climate adaptations in the light of future heat waves,” Müller maintains. In Berlin, for example, “it ignited a debate between different local district authorities as to what extent citizens should be involved in taking care of city trees and if that’s a good use for water.” (It is, Müller argues, considering the costs of planting new trees and the many proven environmental and health benefits of a robust urban treescape.)

One of the inspirations CityLAB Berlin has cited is the NYC Tree Map, a digital tool with roots reaching to 2016 that now maps nearly 1 million trees. “The NYC Tree Map is the most comprehensive and up-to-date living tree map in the world,” the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation declares. “Integrated directly with Parks’ forestry database, the map gives citizens the same real-time access to the urban forest that Parks foresters have on the ground.” This enables New Yorkers to “digitally interact” with the city’s tree population across the five boroughs—for instance, they can monitor a tree’s most recent inspection, with the date and inspection ID.

“Our NYC Tree Map allows casual tree lovers to easily identify trees, flag concerns, and report their care,” NYC Parks Director of Stewardship Nichole Henderson said via email. “Groups and individuals log their tree care activities into the map, like watering, litter removal, soil cultivation and mulching.” Moreover, several citizen groups monitor and use the map to coordinate more ambitious stewardship and maintenance efforts. As examples, Henderson mentions the Jackson Heights Beautification Group, an arts and environmental organization in Queens; Trees New York, a longstanding professional organization that trains “citizen pruners,” among other engagement activities; and the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, whose projects include “community science” efforts such as experiments in capturing and using rainwater. And the tree map is key to NYC Parks’ own broader Let’s Green NYC campaign, which posts “citywide street tree care activities with community partners and allows volunteers to see the visible impact, how they are directly contributing to caring for the urban forest,” Henderson said.

Similar initiatives are playing out in other major cities. The District Department of Transportation (DDOT) in Washington, DC, maintains a digital tree map that encourages citizen involvement (including reporting browning leaves or insect damage, as well as trees in need of watering). The tree map launched with a special focus on maintaining 8,200 trees planted in 2017. Elsewhere, the Adopt-A-Tree app in Athens, Greece, enables citizens to take responsibility for watering individual city trees during dry summer months. And entities like CityLAB Berlin continue to innovate: its new Quantified Trees (“QTrees”) project aims to develop a prediction system supported by artificial intelligence, drawing on databases and sensors to identify urban trees at risk from drought. A prototype is already in testing, and launch is planned for this year.

Zimmermann, of CityLab Berlin, concedes that it has been difficult to precisely demonstrate the impact of these efforts. “This is due to the nature of nature,” she said. Trees adapt slowly, so gauging the effects of watering programs could require years of monitoring growth, roots, leaves, and so on. But in the short term, the project’s data dashboard does illuminate watering patterns —and has shown that watering amounts have increased since the program started, almost certainly countering drought effects. “So the project leads at least to a better understanding and caretaking of urban green,” she continued. In some cases it has sparked local governments to support volunteers with material and guidelines for optimal watering practices.

“Trees are the new polar bears, the trending face of the environmental movement,” the historian and author Jill Lepore observed recently, in a survey of humans’ surprisingly long-lived appreciation for the arboreal. Now we have the science and technology to understand and quantify the value of trees beyond aesthetics. “If our ancestors found it wise and necessary to cut down fast forests, it is all the more needful that their descendants should plant trees,” Andrew Jackson Downing, a landscape architect, wrote in 1847. “Let every man, whose soul is not a desert, plant trees.” Fair enough. But we have the obligation—and the technology—to maintain them, too.

Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. He is the author of The Art of Noticing. His newsletter is at robwalker.substack.com.

Lead image: Newly planted trees along a pop-up bike lane in Berlin, Germany. Credit: IGphotography via iStock/Getty Images Plus.