Urban shade trees offer significant benefits in reducing building air-conditioning demand and improving urban air quality by reducing smog. The savings associated with these benefits vary by climate region and can be up to $200 per tree. The cost of planting trees and maintaining them can vary from $10 to $500 per tree. Tree-planting programs can be designed to have lower costs so that they offer potential savings to communities that plant trees. Our calculations suggest that urban trees play a major role in sequestering CO2 and thereby delay global warming. We estimate that a tree planted in Los Angeles avoids the combustion of 18 kg of carbon annually, even though it sequesters only 4.5–11 kg (as it would if growing in a forest). In this sense, one shade tree in Los Angeles is equivalent to three to five forest trees. In a recent analysis for Baton Rouge, Sacramento, and Salt Lake City, we estimated that planting an average of four shade trees per house (each with a top view cross section of 50 m2) would lead to an annual reduction in carbon emissions from power plants of 16,000, 41,000, and 9000 t, respectively (the per-tree reduction in carbon emissions is about 10–11 kg per year). These reductions only account for the direct reduction in the net cooling- and heating-energy use of buildings. Once the impact of the community cooling is included, these savings are increased by at least 25%.
BT - Environmental Pollution DA - 03/2002 DO - 10.1016/S0269-7491(01)00264-0 IS - 1 LA - eng M1 - Supplement 1 N1 -0269-7491Added to JabRef: 2010.04.16
N2 -Urban shade trees offer significant benefits in reducing building air-conditioning demand and improving urban air quality by reducing smog. The savings associated with these benefits vary by climate region and can be up to $200 per tree. The cost of planting trees and maintaining them can vary from $10 to $500 per tree. Tree-planting programs can be designed to have lower costs so that they offer potential savings to communities that plant trees. Our calculations suggest that urban trees play a major role in sequestering CO2 and thereby delay global warming. We estimate that a tree planted in Los Angeles avoids the combustion of 18 kg of carbon annually, even though it sequesters only 4.5–11 kg (as it would if growing in a forest). In this sense, one shade tree in Los Angeles is equivalent to three to five forest trees. In a recent analysis for Baton Rouge, Sacramento, and Salt Lake City, we estimated that planting an average of four shade trees per house (each with a top view cross section of 50 m2) would lead to an annual reduction in carbon emissions from power plants of 16,000, 41,000, and 9000 t, respectively (the per-tree reduction in carbon emissions is about 10–11 kg per year). These reductions only account for the direct reduction in the net cooling- and heating-energy use of buildings. Once the impact of the community cooling is included, these savings are increased by at least 25%.
PY - 2002 SP - S119 EP - S126 T2 - Environmental Pollution TI - Shade trees reduce building energy use and CO2 emissions from power plants VL - 116 ER -