For the first time in history, more than 50 percent of the world’s population now lives in towns and cities. By 2050, this number is expected to increase to 66 percent. Now more than ever, trees and forests are a vital component of healthy, livable, and sustainable communities around the globe. Urban trees help define a sense of place and well-being where people live, work, play, and learn. Cities are losing thousands of trees each year, the biggest reason for the decline is disinvestment, lack of public knowledge about the importance of urban trees translates to a view that urban trees are a “nice to have” rather than a critical investment. That is why we should look to urban nature as a solution. For the most part, the rapid expansion of cities takes place without any land use planning strategy and the resulting human pressure has highly damaging effects on forests, landscapes, as well as green areas in and around cities. The environmental impacts of urbanization are often intensified by climate change and include increased pollution, decreased availability of food and resources, as well as increased poverty and frequency of extreme climatic events. Urban trees can help to mitigate some of the negative impacts and social consequences of urbanization, and thus make cities more resilient to these changes. For those reasons, the urban trees campaign is going to happened in Wasatiyet Bayrout Al ASHRAFIYE, the 500 trees that we are going to plant are approximately 3 to 5-meter-long, their types vary between (Ficus Benjamnia, Pinus Pinea, Olive trees, Delonix Regia and Jacaranda). The reasons for choosing these types of trees are ( Beirut municipality advised us to choose them because they are the types that they normally plant and so to keep up with the overall esthetic view of the streets, they adapt well to the seasonal changes that happen in Beirut, their purification capacity and their ability to absorb and eliminate the pollutants after the blast that happened in Beirut).
Urban trees : Green vision for the community
