The amount of greenery on your street depends on the amount of green in your pocket, according to a new study.↵
You'd have hard luck trying to convince someone that trees are somehow biased. Their sprawling roots, awning-like leaves, and huggable trunks offer protection and solace to everybody and everything, big and small. For humans, they help clean our air and water, and offer cover in the summer from blistering heat. But a new study shows that their distribution often depends on race and class, a result of exclusionary zoning laws, racial segregation, and the country's stark wealth inequality.↵
In the two-year-long study, a team of researchers from the Nature Conservancy found that 92 percent of low-income blocks in the U.S. have less tree cover and hotter average temperatures than high-income blocks. The inequality is most rampant in the Northeast, with some low-income blocks in urban areas having 30 percent less tree cover and average temperatures 4 degrees Celsius higher than high-income blocks. Five of the ten worst discrepancies are found in Connecticut, home to the most economically unequal metropolitan area in the country and known to be one of the most residentially segregated states in America.↵
Rob McDonald, lead scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said That is no coincidence. For the most part, income inequality will always correlate with other major health, environmental, and social inequities. He added There are many problems facing the US, so I'm not going to pretend like tree cover is the most important problem, but it relates to all these conversations about climate adaptation, climate change risks, and also health outcome and income inequalities that we've seen play a big role during the pandemic. As the US is starting to talk more seriously from a policy perspective about climate change, we have to think about adaptation and also think about how inequality amplified climate risk, starting with the nature in our backyards."