From U.S. Forest Service's Northern Research Station:
ST. PAUL, Minn. -- When it comes to carbon abatement, does a green roof do more good than planting a tree near a building? In which boroughs are street trees doing the most good? Which tree species is giving New York City more carbon abatement for its buck?
A new study by the University of Arkansas and the U.S. Forest Service gives MillionTreesNYC and New Yorkers answers to these and other questions related to the effectiveness of tree planting in carbon abatement. The study gives the London plane tree, trees planted where they shade buildings, and the boroughs of Staten Island and Queens the highest marks for carbon abatement.
The study, “The marginal cost of carbon abatement from planting street trees in New York City,” estimated the discounted cost of net carbon reductions associated with the MillionTreesNYC effort to plant and care for street trees over 50-year and 100-year horizons. Kent Kovacs, an assistant professor with the University of Arkansas, is the principal investigator with co-author Robert Haight, a research forester with the Forest Service’s Northern Research Station in St. Paul, Minn. The study was published recently in the journal Ecological Economics and is available on-line at: http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/44348.
“Because they lower our energy costs, store carbon, and tend to make human beings feel better, we think of urban trees as being priceless,” Haight said. “But in New York City and every city that is spending money to plant and tend trees and remove them when they die, ‘priceless’ comes at a cost.”
The average discounted cost per ton of carbon abated from planting trees near buildings for a 100-year planning horizon ranges from $3,133 per ton of abated carbon for the London plane tree to $8,888 per ton for the Callery pear, Kovacs and Haight found. That compares to an estimated annual cost per ton of carbon abatement in rural forestry programs of between $117 and $1,407 per ton of abated carbon.
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