UDI Director Brett KenCairn provides a briefing on the emerging recognition of the critical role urban forestry will play in addressing climate change and an update on local, regional and national initiatives to significantly expand funding and action in urban forestry. He also provides a brief overview of the recently released “Front Range Urban Forestry Expansion Strategy” calling for a three-year, $100M investment in urban forestry across the Front Range.

As part of their climate strategies, many companies, organisations, cities, regions, and financial institutions are relying on voluntary carbon offsetting—payment to receive credit for a certified unit of emission reduction or removal carried out by another actor. Current best practice helps to reduce some of the well-known risks associated with existing offsets (e.g. improper carbon accounting, re-release of stored carbon, negative unintended impacts on humans or ecosystems, etc.), but is unlikely to deliver the types of offsetting needed to ultimately reach net zero emissions.

UDI has compiled an extensive bibliography of close to 50 citations of both research and media coverage of urban forestry-related topics. This document includes links to the sources for each citation.

With support from the J.M. Kaplan Fund, UDI spent six months working with close to 40 local organizations and jurisdictions in the Colorado Front Range/Denver-Metro area to formulate a detailed, equity-centered urban forestry scale-up strategy. This report provides extensive details on the strategies developed through this broad coalition including equity-based workforce development, community-centered engagement strategies, forestry project scoping and scaling, and an applied urban forestry research approach. This document is meant to be a resource and reference to other metro areas and regions around the country and an indication of the scale of funding and resources needed to achieve transformative urban forestry actions.

UDI worked with six cities with leading urban forestry programs—Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver-Metro and San Francisco—to formulate “shovel ready” rapid urban forestry scale-up strategies designed to support equity-based community recovery and accelerate protection and enhancement of critical “green infrastructure” essential to managing urban heat extremes and other impacts of extreme weather associated with a changing climate. The portfolio provides a framework for other cities to explore similar scale-up strategies.

With support from the J.M. Kaplan Fund, UDI spent six months working with close to 40 local organizations and jurisdictions in the Colorado Front Range/Denver-Metro area to formulate a detailed, equity-centered urban forestry scale-up strategy. This report provides extensive details on the strategies developed through this broad coalition including equity-based workforce development, community-centered engagement strategies, forestry project scoping and scaling, and an applied urban forestry research approach. This document is meant to be a resource and reference to other metro areas and regions around the country and an indication of the scale of funding and resources needed to achieve transformative urban forestry actions.

In collaboration with Stockholm, Helsinki, and Minneapolis, we have completed the management of a six-month urban bioenergy-biochar opportunity assessment. This document includes analysis and resources to enable local jurisdictions to assess the potential for developing bioenergy-biochar projects as part of their climate action strategies.

This guide provides an initial introduction to the core concepts with which a natural systems-based carbon management and ecosystem services strategy can be developed. More detailed process guides are being developed to support carbon management opportunity assessment and strategy development. These process guides will be available at the Urban Drawdown Initiatives website under the “Resources” page.

For those wanting more resources across a range of related carbon drawdown topics, please explore this Carbon Drawdown Syllabus, which provides links to a host of useful resources—particularly overviews of actions currently being taken in early leading efforts around the world.

This document reimagines city-based climate action planning within a framework of systems change.

In 2019-2020, 5 USDN member cities—San Francisco (CA), San Luis Obispo (CA), Boulder (CO), Fayetteville (AK), and Cleveland (OH) worked with consultant Calla Rose Ostrander to develop a process guide and spreadsheet-based tool to optimize the capture and utilization of urban organic wastes.

Project Drawdown is a world-class research organization that reviews, analyses, and identifies the most viable global climate solutions, and shares these findings with the world. We partner with communities, policy-makers, non-profits, businesses, investors, and philanthropists to identify and deploy science-based, effective climate solutions—as quickly, safely, and equitably as possible.

The purpose of this report is to highlight some of the themes of recent state policy initiatives related to soil health, and to identify specific examples of these proposals. Some have been enacted, some have been proposed, and others are still being contemplated.

To help prepare for potential opportunities to advance healthy soils policy at the federal level in 2021, and at the state level on an ongoing basis, Breakthrough Strategies & Solutions solicited input on policy solutions from a few dozen experts in the areas of agricultural policy and healthy soils. Our focus for this assessment was somewhat narrow – healthy soils and soil carbon sequestration, rather than a full ecological and socioeconomic assessment of soils, farming, and rural development policies.

This report addresses greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes in land-based ecosystems, land use, and sustainable land management in relation to climate change adaptation and mitigation, desertification, land degradation, and food security. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change.

This U.S. Community Protocol for Accounting and Reporting of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (US Community Protocol) is designed to inspire and guide U.S. local governments to account for and report on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the communities they represent.

Recent demonstrations of the role of plant–soil biota interactions have challenged the conventional view that vegetation changes are mainly driven by changing abiotic conditions…Here, we demonstrate experimentally that one-time additions of soil biota and plant seeds alter soil-borne nematode and plant community composition in semi-natural grassland for 20 years. Over time, aboveground and below ground community composition became increasingly correlated, suggesting an increasing connectedness of soil biota and plants.