Right tree, right place for whom? Environmental justice and practices of urban forest assessment

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ecosystem services from urban trees and other green amenities form the basis for sweeping urban greening initiatives that can paradoxically worsen socio-ecological inequalities in cities. Previous research demonstrating distributive injustices like gentrification arising from urban greening have led to new efforts to integrate an environmental justice lens into urban ecosystem service planning and management. However, data-driven practices of technocratic expertise, like those that draw on ecosystem service quantification and valuation, may themselves become sites where procedural injustice emerges. This paper examines procedural justice in urban tree canopy assessments, a genre of technical document prepared for expert audiences that typically describes the urban tree canopy through the lens of ecosystem service valuation. Drawing on 30 assessments from U.S. cities, our analysis highlights how assessments deploy a scalar politics of tree value that evades questions of greenspace equity and helps forge an expert consensus around market-oriented sustainability before a management plan is written. We show how forestry principles of “right tree, right place” combine with boundary work around tree risk to empower expert-led management and deprioritize civic involvement. While injustice can emerge through the practices of technocratic expertise that undergird management for ecosystem services, we caution against wholesale rejection of data-driven decision-making and point towards ways to selectively embrace data to enable new forms of civic involvement. We conclude by calling for urban forest assessments that shift the focus towards the relationships between trees and people along with a broader integration of procedural justice into processes of urban ecosystem service management. Highlights UTC assessments tend to prioritise the monetary value of trees and oversimplify tree risks and costs in ways that narrow management options to those that maximise total market value. Assessments rarely include environmental justice considerations and discuss tree risk in a manner that excludes communities from decision-making. Trade-offs between different ecosystem (dis)services could require a survey of resident preferences to ensure that ecosystem services are received as benefits and to ensure fairness.