The Main — June 29: Trees Lounge
Municipalities play a central role in what's coming through design expectations and building smart. Some may even talk about it in the coming election. To understand it all, let's talk about trees
Three elm trees ring the new house that my wife and I just bought in central Edmonton, at the south and western edges of our property. Each is at least fifty feet tall. Underneath the leafy green canopy that these three giants create in the summer is a world of pleasant shade from the blazing sun. And shade equals cool. During the past days of this unprecedented heat wave, we’ve been able to keep our house about 10 degrees Celsius cooler than outside air temperature without using any energy, aside from two small room fans. The elms above us have done most of the work. Members of our family who live in newer parts of Edmonton where the tree canopy hasn’t grown in and isn’t situated near the houses anyway — more on this in a moment — have visited and remarked how nice it is inside our house.
This got me thinking: One, trees matter on our heating planet. But two, the trees are here conserving my energy use because of municipal design standards and thinking about energy, as well as pleasant shade, not because of provincial or federal policy. And given that we’re staring down an electricity grid that’s under maximum strain at the moment (it failed while writing this and I expect it to fail again), the reason our house is able to conserve in the heat is a good old municipal decision. And the reason that other households in Alberta will not able to conserve as our grid begs for mercy in this insane heat is also a largely thanks to municipal decisions.
In short, municipalities have a lot of influence on where we’re going with climate change (and will be on the hook to pay for it, too). While the provinces either adopt or fight carbon taxation and the federal government loses its key champion on acting on climate change, it is in fact our local governments where big change has, can and will have to take place.
Both Calgary and Edmonton have broad climate-change policies. Many smaller municipalities have climate-change action plans, including efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Alberta Urban Municipalities Association and Rural Municipalities of Alberta jointly have created the Municipal Climate Change Action Centre, too. What all municipalities have, however, is deep control and influence over how the neighbourhoods within them are built. Tree canopies are nice to look at — if there’s one thing I love about my neighbourhood, it’s the canopy — but are also part of the passive, or energy-free, ways we can build our neighbourhoods to allow people to use less energy.
The shade they provide even allows those who bike to continue biking during the heat:
And when the shade isn’t there, we will revert to using what is sadly contributing to the problem in the first place:
Shade is something that municipalities have deep control over and it’s a definite battleground in denser areas. As cities grow upward, the shadows that buildings cast are portrayed as unwanted and unacceptable, and taller, denser developments are often relegated to only being buildable in certain (read not the single-family home areas) parts of our cities because of backlash. What the heat wave has exposed in Canada, one could argue, is whether this might need a rethink:
My home city of Edmonton is working to grow its tree canopy by one-fifth from its current size, and in 2017 it adopted a tree protection program. These are deeply smart and needed ideas. The trees we have are critical to keeping us cool as our climate here at 53 degrees latitude, just seven degrees south of the territories and in the subarctic biome, comes to grips with days that exceed 38 Celsius rather than the not-too distant past, when it was the minus 40 days (few and far between now) that dominated our anxieties.
In October, Albertans will go to the polls to elect municipal governments. Some candidates will talk about climate change and about the municipality’s role in making the changes we need to not only try to slow the change but even just live comfortably within what’s already happening. While voters may think it’s the federal and provincial governments that have the most control over our destiny when it comes to climate — and to be clear, both of these governments do have significant control and power — we need to remember that it’s also municipalities that can influence whether broad visions from the top work at the bottom.
Or put another way: Ottawa and the provinces may (or may not) point us toward a future where we work to reduce the energy we need from carbon, but it’ll only work if places like Edmonton also work to keep building neighbourhoods with tree canopies.