High Utility Bills? Plant a Tree!

Recent studies and traditional building wisdom agree: trees, planted strategically around a home, can dramatically affect temperature regulation. Before the advent of modern heating and cooling technology, “passive” heating and cooling methods were an absolute necessity. Somewhere between those days and today, we must have forgotten those basic tenets of utilitarian landscaping. That is, until our energy bills caught up with us.

When deciduous trees are strategically planted around a home, they can provide shade from the hot sun. When the seasons change and it becomes cold outside, the leaves fall and the sun is once again allowed to warm the same walls and windows that were shaded in the summer months. In this way trees can simply and inexpensively regulate and reduce household utility costs.

Extend this idea of capitalizing on the natural value of trees and applying technical know-how to monitor and care for them and you get “urban forestry,” a new way of thinking about trees, the built environment and the relationship between the two. While most would agree that our urban forests should be valued, it can be difficult to determine real monetary numbers, which can be a big problem when we try to decide how to manage these resources.

Two organizations, American Forests and the US Forest Service, have created revolutionary software capable of estimating just how valuable our urban forests really are. While there are many factors that go into assigning a monetary value to the trees in our cities, one such factor is becoming glaringly apparent as we enter the hot summer months and start getting our utility bills in the mail and power consumption rises.

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, “planting trees and vegetation is a simple and effective way to reduce urban heat islands.” Not only do trees shade our heat-absorbing roads from the sun, but the evapotranspiration from their leaves has a temperature-regulating effect that can make our cities much more pleasant. I’ve you’ve ever walked across a hot parking lot and onto a lush, green lawn, you’ve experienced the sometimes dramatic regulating effects of evapotranspiration.

Among other important “services" trees provide, such as storm water mitigation, carbon sequestration, aesthetics, noise reduction and increased property values, the energy-saving properties of our urban forests demonstrate the sometimes surprising value of a resource we often overlook as we search for new ways to use technology to solve problems in urban planning. As new tenets in smart growth and New Urbanism reach the forefront of urban planning, it is becoming more and more clear that the best and most cost-efficient solutions are often the simplest and we have only to look to our own history books to find them. Please view the links below and throughout this post for more information.

Image courtesy of the United States Environmental Protection Agency

Additional Links:

http://www.treelink.org/docs/29_reasons.phtml

http://www.epa.gov/hiri/strategies/vegetation.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070409181831.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/columnist/block/2001-02-27-block.htm

http://ohiodnr.com/forestry/urban/features/treepower/tabid/5463/Default.aspx

http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/realestate/advice/chi-landscaping_chomes_fri_0620jun20,0,7467728.story