Abstract

Road traffic carbon emissions are an important cause of global warming, and street trees play an important role in regulating road carbon emissions. During urbanization, major differences in the planting management modes and growth status of the street trees in urban–suburban gradient may exist, leading to significant differences in the low-carbon values of the street trees in urban–suburban gradient. Based on this, this study took two typical urban–suburban gradient zones in Shanghai as an example to analyze the changes in the characteristics of street tree species, planting density, tree sizes, and low-carbon contribution with urban and rural changes, and proposed strategies for optimizing the low-carbon contribution of urban street trees. The results showed that, from the inner ring to the outer ring and the suburban ring, the proportion of London plane tree gradually changed from 82% to 11%, and the proportion of the camphor tree gradually changed from 9% to 70%; the average DBH of the trees gradually decreased from 28.81 to 23.74 cm. The number of plantings per unit road length gradually increased, and the number of plantings per unit area gradually decreased; therefore, the average low-carbon contribution of urban–suburban street trees is not significant, but the low-carbon contribution of upper street trees per unit area is higher, and suburban unit street trees have a higher low-carbon contribution. Finally, this article proposes different optimization strategies for future urban micro-renewal and suburban new-city construction.

Highlights

  • Carbon emissions are a significant cause of global warming [1]

  • In terms of tree attributes, we focused on the tree species and tree sizes that had the greatest impact on the low-carbon contribution of urban–suburban street trees

  • In comparison to previous studies, which only estimated the contribution of direct carbon sequestration, this research can better reflect the role of street trees in achieving carbon neutrality [49,50,51]

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Summary

Introduction

Governments in various countries have proposed the goal of peaking their carbon consumption and becoming carbon neutral to actively respond to climate issues [2]. As an important form of green infrastructure in cities, street trees can provide urban residents with many ecosystem service functions with low-carbon contributions, such as carbon sequestration, runoff regulation, and air purification [3,4,5]. Street trees can directly affect the carbon cycle through carbon fixation, and can reduce carbon emissions by reducing the consumption of resources and energy through environmental governance, including runoff regulation and air purification [6,7]. Assessing the direct and indirect low-carbon contributions of street trees and proposing optimization plans has practical significance for the realization of the “dual carbon” goal

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