By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
The Adams administration’s PlaNYC announced the goal of a 30% tree canopy for New York City on April 20, 2023. Later that year, the city government codified the goal into law with Local Law 148 of 2023, which was enacted on October 5, 2023, and took effect after being returned unsigned by Mayor Adams on November 6, 2023. Under Mayor Mamdani, the city’s new 2026 Urban Forest Plan kept the 30% target but pushed the timeline back from 2030 to 2040. The Adams administration’s method for “getting things done” was to throw money at cronies and sole-source contractors and spending without concern for the city’s fiscal well-being. Some of the overspending was a response to the immigration crisis caused when the Governor of Texas bused immigrants to New York City, and we suddenly had a set of huge, unpredicted expenses. Some of the overspending was the result of corruption and mismanagement. The result is that Adams left an unbalanced budget, and the Mamdani Administration must now go through the painful exercise of setting priorities and reducing expenses; as a result, our trees and parks have been left behind.
According to Mayor Mamdani’s 2026 Urban Forest Plan:
“As of 2021, tree canopy covers 23.4 percent of the city, an increase of 1.2 percent from 2017. Yet this citywide growth masks uneven trends. Some areas, including neighborhoods in eastern Queens, have experienced canopy loss. The data also reveals that tree canopy in historically disadvantaged neighborhoods can be below 10 percent.”
The 2026 plan includes inspirational statements by the Mayor, the city’s Chief Climate Officer, and the city’s Parks Commissioner, but the lofty goals for a green canopy are not matched with the green cash that we really need to enhance our trees and parks. An excellent piece with the subhead: “Money Grows Trees” by Samantha Maldonado in The City reports that:
“Mamdani’s plan… has set a target date for the goal of a 30% canopy. But critically, the money to pay for it has not been committed. “Many of the actions in the plan rely on existing program budgets and aim to ensure that we are spending smarter,” City Hall spokesperson Jessica Woolford said in a statement. “We are creatively leveraging funds from government and private sources to advance our shared goals.” City Hall did not offer its own estimate for the cost. But according to a 2022 estimate from a local environmental advocacy group, it would cost about $500 million to plant a million trees and achieve its canopy goal. “The plan is great, but what comes after is the most critical part,” said Shravanthi Kanekal, a resiliency planner at the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. “It’s going to signal a whole lot to see how much they dedicate funding to the plan.” Though as a candidate, Mamdani promised to dedicate 1% of the budget to the Department of Parks and Recreation, his preliminary budget this year proposed spending just half of that — cutting nearly $34 million from the department’s budget in the current fiscal year.”
The Urban Forest Plan does emphasize that some of the funding for tree planting would come from private sources, as well as other parts of the city’s capital budget. In fact, about one-third of the city’s trees are located on private property and only about half of the trees are in our parks. The Urban Forest Plan notes that the city government should: “Ensure that all City capital projects consider trees by incorporating urban forestry into the Climate Resiliency Design Guidelines and prioritizing tree preservation, planting, and maintenance as a design strategy for addressing extreme heat and stormwater flood risk.”
The multiple benefits of trees and parks to combating the impacts of climate change are well known, but the key benefits are the reduction in human health impacts from excessive heat and reduced flooding from extreme weather events. The city’s first million-tree project was implemented by Mike Bloomberg’s team, reached its goal in eight rather than ten years, and benefited from a $300 million allocation from Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030 budget.
As important as planting new trees is to increase canopy cover, it turns out that maintaining and managing the existing urban forest is more important. In a study entitled “New York’s Living Infrastructure,” recently released by New York City Comptroller Mark Levine, his team found that:
“Canopy growth has been driven primarily by existing trees, not new planting.
While tree planting programs remain important, recent data indicate that increases in canopy coverage are largely attributable to the maturation of existing trees. This reflects both the long-term nature of canopy growth and the importance of early-stage survival. Without sufficient maintenance, newly planted trees do not contribute meaningfully to canopy expansion…[and that] maintenance gaps are undermining the health and longevity of the urban forest. Tree care, including pruning, watering, and soil management, is essential, particularly in the first years after planting. Yet chronic underfunding and staffing reductions have limited the City’s ability to provide consistent care. Backlogs in pruning and inspection requests, as well as elevated early tree mortality rates, indicate that current maintenance capacity is insufficient to sustain canopy growth.”
The issue is that, as important and obvious as the benefits of the urban forest are, they are not seen as important as educating children and expanding pre-school, nor as critical as housing and feeding those in need. The mayor ran his campaign on making the city affordable for people who are not rich. As important as other goals are, even to the mayor and his team, when budgets are tight, the mayor is forced to make difficult choices. Moreover, with many trees on private property, issues of governance arise that must be approached carefully. If expensive tree maintenance requirements are imposed on tree owners, some might be forced to cut their trees to save money. An incentive program where verified planting and maintenance costs could reduce property taxes might have a more positive impact on the urban forest canopy. But those tax expenditures would further unbalance the budget.
Nevertheless, with 53% of the city’s trees located in parks, a huge piece of tree maintenance must be paid out of the always declining city parks budget. Parks have long lost out in the competition for city resources, and as I and others have argued repeatedly, the only solution is a dedicated revenue stream. In August 2024, I wrote that:
“…we need to develop an institution like the Water Authority, built on a specific user fee. While we can’t and shouldn’t charge a park user fee, there is another approach that could work. The most logical source of revenue would be one based on a modest increase in property tax that is placed in a trust fund beyond the reach of elected officials and allocated by a quasi-governmental authority that is prohibited from diverting the resources to non-park uses. The amount of funding would be pegged at 1% of the city’s total budget, and taxes would be automatically adjusted to meet that number. Last year, New York City generated about $32 billion in property tax. A tax increase of about 3.1% would generate about a billion dollars a year, or close to 1% of the city budget, for a Parks Authority Trust Fund. This would remove parks from the budget competition and would be a tax investment that would pay off in increased property values.”
If a 3% property tax increase seems too high due to the city’s affordability crisis, a property tax increase of 1% would generate over $300 million a year, and that could be a way to begin funding a Parks Authority. If a surcharge on tickets to concerts and sports events was also used to fund the Parks Authority, even more funding could be generated. The point is, we need to figure out some creative ways to fund the development and maintenance of the city’s parks as well as its urban forest. Trees grow on money, and New York City’s people and parks require trees.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
