Benefits of Trees
The Benefits Trees Provide to You, Your Family and Your Community
Why plant and maintain trees? Consider this incredible list of benefits from the Chicago Region Trees Initiative, which undertook a scientific literature review. For a deeper dive, here’s their analysis with citations: https://chicagorti.org/tree-benefits/
Economic Benefits:
- Reducing stormwater runoff
- Reducing air and water pollution
- Reducing energy costs and use associated with heating and cooling
- Reducing the urban heat island
- Protecting roadways and reducing the amount of asphalt sealers required
- Reducing noise pollution
- Providing valuable carbon storage and sequestration
- Increasing food security of urban areas
- Increasing property values and economic vitality of the town
Health Benefits:
- Increase attention, memory, reflection and focus
- Reduce stress or increased ability to recover from stress
- Increase life satisfaction and positive thoughts or emotions
- Lower mortality rates from non-accidental deaths
- Shorten recovery times in the hospital and increased perception of health
- Increase physical activity
- Reduce diastolic blood pressure
Children and students benefit from the presence of trees, which can:
- Reduce symptoms of attention deficit disorders and increase attention
- Increase in classroom engagement
- Improve test scores in reading and mathematics
- Improve the mood of teenagers and lower their emotions of depression, anger, and fatigue
- Increase self-discipline, impulse inhibition, and concentration in young girls
- Improve physical health
Community Benefits:
- Well-maintained trees are related to lower crime rates
- A green view from a home can lower aggression and violence in that home
- Well-maintained trees are related to reduced property crimes and violent crimes
Trees encourage people to gather in common outdoor space, causing:
- Increased social capital and ultimately increased supervision of children
- Increased sense of community and safety
Benefits of large, older trees:
- Large, old trees are critically important worldwide from an ecological and cultural perspective. Despite their importance, these trees are declining globally. Emphasis must be made to preserve large, old trees as they provide numerous benefits, especially in urban environments. Once large old trees are lost from the community, it is difficult if not impossible to replace their cultural and ecological function.
Large trees provide critical benefits for their role in:
- Creating habitat for other species
- Managing important environmental cycles and processes
- Storing and sequestering significant amounts of carbon