THE PROBLEM
THE BIGGER PICTURE
European tree cover has undergone sufficient change in recent years, with tree harvesting increasing by 34% while urban build-up has more than doubled across the continent. Deforestation in the Netherlands alone has seen the cutting down of 2.5 million mature trees across both urban, semi-urban and rural environments in the past decade. This has led to detrimental impacts on biodiversity, water retention levels and CO2 uptake as well as more societal effects including decreased citizen well-being, an increase in the urban heat island effect and concentration of fine pollutants.
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Our living lab partner, the environmental organisation Urgenda, hopes to revert these drastic effects through issuing the Meer Bomen Nu campaign in 2020 with the aim to plant a million trees this year in the Netherlands and further across Europe.
MUNICIPAL PRIORITY AND LACK OF ACTION
While carving the way for a new, innovative type of urban greening, implementing the Meer Bomen Nu method comes with a number of setbacks spanning multiple temporal and spatial scales. An assumed challenge is that there is currently not a re-applicable methodology used across Dutch municipalities. With municipalities as key stakeholders, we also assume that most municipalities are interested in greening cities by adding trees in a financially-beneficial way.
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RELEVANT EXPOSURE AND EDUCATION
A more case-specific challenge faced by Urgenda is gaining adequate attention and momentum for Meer Bomen Nu. There is already a multitude of other environmental movements pushing urban climate adaptation alongside Meer Bomen Nu, so attaining the appropriate ground for Urgenda is a challenge that many similar greening organisations struggle with. Due to also being a not-for-profit, involving and involving educating volunteers and local citizens in the campaign is essential. While this wasn’t an issue for the first planting season last year, it is not known if sustaining the relevant task force of volunteers will be an issue in the future.