Sunday morning you step out into the city’s heat making your way to the market—taking shade under patches of trees that line the street. You notice the sparrows chattering above as bees buzz through sidewalk blooms. You might wander through a community garden behind the library, where butterflies dance over wildflowers, picking a sweet mulberry from the tree where the red-winged blackbird makes her nest. Life connects each green space like a living web through the city—a living web we call the urban forest.  

What is an Urban Forest?

An urban forest is more than just a collection of street trees or parklands within city limits. It includes all trees, forests, marshes, grasses, green spaces, and their intertwined ecological, cultural, and infrastructural components—both seen and unseen—within and around a city. From container trees on concrete corners to woodlots buffering highways, from narrow brooks weaving through parks to the plant-lined ditches bounding county roads, the urban forest is a complex web that breathes life into the built environment. We who inhabit these places, and especially those tasked with city policies, have a responsibility to keep and strengthen this breath of life that fills the places we call home. In recognition of this responsibility, the number of Canadian municipalities developing urban forest plans has grown more than five-fold over the past decade. In this post we explain what urban forests are and why they matter for the human and non-human life in our cities. We explain how Canadian, particularly Ontario, municipal policies and urban forest plans can evolve from tree-focused management toward more inclusive, connected, and relational approaches to caring for urban nature.

Why do we need urban forests?

Urban forests are good for our minds, bodies, and souls. They provide the natural beauty we see around us in our urban settings. They give food, shade, and shelter to human and non-human beings living in our communities. They are places of leisure, of business, of community. They play a crucial role in slowing, stopping, and protecting against the effects of climate change. They clean the air we breathe, filter our waters, cool our streets, and support the wildlife and biodiversity living with us in our cities. Even from an economic standpoint, urban forests can add value to our cities—one 2014 study shows that for every dollar spent on maintaining and managing urban forests in Canadian cities, we might see an increase of $1.9 to $12.7 in value. This can come in the form of added property value, increased business, tourism, and/or recreational space. 

How colonization and early municipalities have reshaped existing landscapes

Early European settler colonization of Turtle Island dramatically reshaped landscapes, including through intensive land use change and deforestation. The resulting degradation and poor environmental conditions, along with the loss of real and perceived services provided by urban forests (such as providing shade, aesthetic value, and stopping erosion of shorelines), prompted the creation of some of the earliest planned parks near urban settings and the greening of urban centres. Organized efforts around “urban greening” began to emerge at the turn of the 20th century. Some early municipal efforts include: the 1884 Toronto Parks, Forestry, and Recreation group (then the “Committee on Public Walks and Gardens”), the 1886 Vancouver Park Board, and the 1869 Ottawa tree bylaw. In the current Canadian context, the responsibility to care for and manage the complexities of urban forests usually falls on municipal governments- through power granted to them by the province but without significant provincial or federal oversight. 

The legislative and policy framework of urban forests

In Ontario, provincial legislation supports the creation of municipal urban forest plans, though they are not explicitly required. Sections 10 and 11 of the  Municipal Act empower municipalities to pass bylaws regarding the environment and climate change. Additionally, section 135 empowers municipalities to prohibit and regulate the destruction or injury of trees, while considering “good forestry practices” under the Forestry Act. The Forestry Act along with the Trees Act empowers municipalities to pass bylaws with respect to lands designated for forestry for both extractive and protective purposes. Depending on where you live in Ontario, however, there may be additional regionally and contextually specific levels of provincial direction.

Additionally, the Provincial Planning Statement, 2024 (“PPS”) (enacted under Ontario’s Planning Act, section 3) provides policy direction on provincial interests that all municipal planning authorities must follow in their approaches to development and land use planning. The PPS classifies urban forests as “green infrastructure”, which is a broad category that includes, but is not limited to, natural heritage features and systems, parklands, stormwater management systems, street trees, natural channels, permeable surfaces, and green roofs. “Green infrastructure” appears in two policies under the PPS. The first is policy 2.9.1(d), which directs that planning authorities, when creating approaches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and plan for climate change, must, among other things, as part of their approach, “promote green infrastructure.” The second, policy 3.6.8(c), directs that when planning for stormwater management, planning authorities must “minimize erosion and changes in water balance including through the use of green infrastructure.” 

While these policies require that municipal planning authorities include green infrastructure in their approaches the definition of green infrastructure is open ended, and includes natural and human-made elements. As a result, when planning for climate change and stormwater management, it appears that planning authorities could be compliant with the PPS even if they included only human-made structures in their approaches, the PPS does, though, direct that municipalities protect natural features and areas for the long term. This includes the protection of biodiversity and connectivity within and between natural features including wetlands, significant woodlands, and linkages intended to support biological diversity in our urban spaces. In other words, there is no policy under the PPS that explicitly requires municipal planning authorities to consider the urban forest.

The PPS is implemented in large part through municipal official plans, required under s.16 of the Planning Act. An official plan is a municipality’s policy document that decides how land should be used in a given community. Official plans help guide and determine where and when a municipality will grow, covering everything from housing and jobs to roads, schools, and parks. As a result, official plans can be looked to for a better understanding of how municipalities might promote green infrastructure, protect the environment, and envision the place of urban forests in particular. Many municipal official plans have a section dedicated to the environment, which includes reference to urban forests to varying degrees. For example, in Ontario,  Windsor’s Official Plan, under Policy 5.3.6 on Urban Forestry, directs that the municipal Council will recognize and encourage the protection, diversity, and planting of trees. London’s Official Plan, under Policy 1417.2(j), makes the City’s urban forest a priority of its natural heritage system. 

In addition to official plans, municipalities can regulate urban trees—both municipally-owned and citizen-owned—through tree by-laws. Tree by-laws can have a greater impact than municipal policy approaches, as they can prohibit the cutting of trees. For example, London’s priority on the urban forest is reflected in its Tree Protection By-Law, C.P.-1555-252, which prohibits the injury or destruction of trees without municipal permit (making it is stronger than Windsor’s Tree By-Law 135-2004).

However, tree by-law approaches tend to be so narrowly focused that they miss the forest for the trees, meaning they fail to consider the non-tree biological diversity that exists as part of the urban forest—the grasses and shrubs, the birds and the bees, the mosses and monarchs. 

In addition to official plans and tree by-laws, therefore, there is an important role for urban forest plans to help municipalities advance their environmental and climate change priorities.  Sometimes referred to as urban forest management, strategic, master, policy, or action plans, urban forest plans (“UFPs”) can be important tools for putting such municipal priorities into practice: they standardize policies for tree care, promote canopy growth and species diversity, and incorporate goals like habitat connectivity, climate adaptation, and community stewardship. Comprehensive UFPs that use clear performance indicators and consider regional cooperation can help municipalities align with provincial priorities around land use planning and development while ensuring healthier, sustainable urban forests. 

What do UFPs look like across Canada?

A 2024 study of UFPs across Canada identified trends and common features including vision, objectives, targets, and indicators. The study identified 74 Canadian municipalities that have explicit UFPs, while 309 municipalities across the country have urban forest-related policies. According to the study, UFPs typically have four main components: 

1) Vision statement: these typically outline principal values and broad, multi-year goals;

2) Specific management objectives: the objectives address how the municipality will achieve the broad goals outlined in the vision statement, which usually includes the operational and strategic dimensions of the plan and include how resources will be allocated to achieve the goals; 

 3) Indicators: these are specific, measurable pieces of information used to track progress toward the goal or objectives. This might seem simple if one is only considering how many trees are in a given location, but measuring the health and well-being of an ecosystem requires more than just a simple tree count; and

4) Targets: these are the desired levels of the indicators that the municipality aims to achieve within a specific time frame. Oversight and accountability measures in these plans typically include public consultation and outreach as well as publicly available progress reports. 

The study found that while most plans focus almost exclusively on issues related to tree abundance (tree numbers, size, condition, and variety), more recent and updated UFPs have shown an increased focus on issues such as climate change, canopy cover, and community education and involvement. This shift reflects an understanding that the urban forest is more than just trees; it is a breathing, living ecosystem to which we belong and on whose health and wellbeing we depend.

UFPs and Connecting our Urban Forests

UFPs have come a long way in advancing healthier, more sustainable cities, which is an encouraging trend that continues to grow across Canada. If we intend to live in better relation with the non-human life in urban centres it is important to continue to widen the scope of UFPs to include the well-being and prosperity of all living beings that depend on healthy environments and relationships to live and grow in urban areas. This includes attention and care for the connectivity of the urban forest. Plants, animals, fungi, all living beings rely on connected networks—relationships—to live and function, and so UFPs should set targets to connect fragmented natural areas and reestablish connectivity of the natural world that weaves through our cities. Human residents of our cities could contribute in their own ways and would see the benefits of this connectivity, too. 

Initial findings from the UWindsor National Urban Park Hub (UW-NUPH)’s community engagement in Windsor-Essex found that residents desire more access and connection to nature—a common sentiment across cities in Canada. A more connected urban forest would provide human residents of our cities better access to connect and build relationships with all living beings in the city. Considering the inequitable distribution of access to urban forests between and within communities, there has been a growing demand for inclusive planning and decision-making in shaping the policies and practices that relate to urban forests in which we live. UFPs also cannot function sustainably if implemented in a standalone way; they should be interwoven with—informing, and be informed by—other municipal policies including, among others, transportation, land-use, and housing. 

UFPs should do more than just establish policies to protect and conserve nature in our cities for the sake of conservation. UFPs should be relationally-based, and smart urban forest planning should envision and work toward healthier relationships between humans and the natural world that is always around us, and to which we belong. In 2024 the City of Windsor released their Urban Forest Management Plan (UFMP), which in some respects, aligns with the principals proposed in this blog. A closer examination of Windsor’s UFMP and the extent to which it deals with the broader ecologies of the urban setting will be the subject of a future blog.

It is our responsibility to care for and build benevolent relationships with the complex web of life that breathes life into our cities—the urban forest. To do this, we need to spend time with nature. Urban forest planning has the potential to protect the urban nature around us and help us, as individuals and communities, to build reciprocal relationships with nature, in a healthy way. 

Lead authors
Dr. Ali Mokdad, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Cities; Terra Duchene, Environmental Lawyer and Research Fellow, Centre for Cities; and Dr. Anneke Smit, Associate Professor, Windsor Law and Director, Centre for Cities

This work was supported by the Centre for Cities team, including Safa Youness, Crystal Waddell, Kaitlyn Di Pietro, and Rino Bortolin.