Supporting climate action through tree planting

Summary

Coastal communities are at significant risk from the impacts from climate change, such as coastal erosion and flooding, so it is important that these communities are collectively involved in local actions, like tree planting, to mitigate the impacts.

The Coastal Community Growing Together (CCGT) project developed an online platform to foster this type of collective action despite social distancing measures. The platform included a mapping tool, a tree carbon calculator, a community response dashboard, and interactive educational resources.  By showing the best location to plant trees, and explaining the benefits of doing so, these tools helped to raise awareness of climate change and increase community participation.

Over 800 participants were involved, including school children and citizen’s groups in Pembrokeshire, Wales. The project has promoted the uptake of local climate actions, helping to protect the environment and promote biodiversity.

Research description

Community tree planting is widely recognised as an important nature-based response to the impacts of climate change, and it is a creative approach to raising awareness of the issue. However, tree planting initiatives are often designed as one-off events, rather than considering the lifecycle of trees and the possibilities this offers for long-term community engagement with the climate and biodiversity crises. CCGT aimed to broaden the potential of tree planting initiatives by addressing the need for on-going community engagement with climate actions.

The CCGT is part of a larger project that aimed to help coastal communities adapt to climate change. To do so, researchers at UCD collaborated with local organisations to engage school children, teachers, retired people, women’s groups and councillors using an online platform. This platform enables participants to identify the best locations to plant trees through the combination of local area maps and visual media content, promoting learning about nature-based solutions.

For example, the educational resources on the platform helped communities understand the preferred conditions (soils, sunlight, etc.) for each tree species, and increased their knowledge of native trees. As a result, communities developed a better understanding of the role that trees play in local carbon sequestration (i.e., capturing and storing carbon dioxide). One participant’s feedback on the platform said: “It has inspired me to plant more trees in the garden and to consider the impact of daily activities.”

The CCGT platform changes the way tree planting initiatives engage with communities. The “(opens in a new window)Community Response Dashboard” and the “(opens in a new window)Tree Carbon Calculator” encourage much needed long-term engagement with climate action. These user-friendly tools provide real-time monitoring of the carbon sequestration and the biodiversity benefits resulting from the tree planting activity, so that users can monitor the impacts of their participation over time. Another participant said that they: “Cycle to work more often than driving. I had no idea of how social media has a carbon footprint! I will use Facebook less.”

Research impact

The online platform and suite of tools developed for the CCGT project have changed the possibilities for encouraging long-term participation with local climate action. The focus on user-experience through easy-to-use interactive tools and visually engaging information about nature-based solutions encourages a deeper level of understanding of how we can tackle the climate crisis.

Educational impact

Over 800 people participated in the initiative, which included 12 schools and 10 community groups in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Participant groups were provided with a range of resources to help them learn about different native tree species and to choose the best sites to plant them as part of a nature-based approach to tackling climate change.

The interactive tools allow the participants to monitor and understand the real-time benefits of their tree planting for the environment, in terms that are relevant to their everyday experience. This inspires long-term engagement with climate action. For example, the community response dashboard and the tree carbon calculator compare tree planting benefits with the carbon intensity of car journeys, typical daily social media use, and the average carbon footprint of a UK Amazon purchase.

This work will also contribute to improving the mental health of pupils, students and staff.

— Nick Makin, School Business Manager, Henry Tudor School, Milford Haven, Wales

Environmental impact

Through this project, over 1,930 native tree species were planted as part of the local community response to the effects of climate change. This equates to 383,270 kg of carbon sequestered (captured and stored) over a 10-year period. It also equates to 25 new habitats for 172 wildlife species. Ongoing efforts by the project team and stakeholders across Government aim to increase the use of this platform in other settings, so that more trees are planted, more carbon is sequestered, and more species are protected.

Technological impact

Many of the online tools that aim to increase citizen engagement in climate action depend on proprietary tools which incur large license fees. Similarly, many of the existing open-source tools are project-specific and also require advanced GIS and programming skills. This poses difficulties for research teams or community engagement practitioners who may lack the necessary technical expertise or finances to create bespoke tools.

The CCGT platform seeks to overcome some of the challenges for non-experts when developing their own participatory initiatives. It uses cloud-based technologies to provide online templates that are currently available to researchers within UCD. As a result, they can  quickly deploy similar community engagement initiatives without the need to invest much effort and resources in the development of a new tool.

Academic impact

CCGT is part of a larger project, Coastal Communities Adapting Together (CCAT), which focuses scholarly attention on the use of digital tools for engaging coastal communities with climate adaptation. A (opens in a new window)journal article, outlining how the researchers moved to a digital project in response to COVID-19, was published in Ocean and Coastal Management in July 2021. In addition, a template of the CCGT platform and community response dashboard (including the environmental indicators and carbon calculator tool) will be freely available to researchers for future participatory initiatives via the UCD Earth Institute.

This is so user friendly, so interactive. This should be everywhere. I would think it is a brilliant tool for behaviour change and it's so simple. It does a really good job of relating what you can do to the complexity of the problem.

— Vicky Brown, RewriteClimate Education and Cool Planet Experience Group