Growing a City in the Trees: Lessons From Trees for Kaimukī, Honolulu

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Can Honolulu — Hawaii's capital and largest city — become a city in the trees? Can other cities and neighbourhoods? The answer, according to a guide published by the National Park Service, is yes, but only if communities and neighbourhoods are actively involved in planning, planting and caring for their trees, and feel a deep connection to and ownership of them.

A shrinking canopy

Honolulu, on the southeast coast of Oʻahu, the third largest of the Hawaiian Islands, is losing its tree canopy at an alarming rate: more than 76,000 trees in just four years, nearly 5 percent of its urban canopy. It is not alone. Research by the U.S. Forest Service and others shows urban tree cover declining across the country, to a national average of just 27 percent. Honolulu's canopy averages only 20 percent, and some neighbourhoods, like Kaimukī, have even less, according to the Honolulu Urban Tree Canopy Assessment and the Hawaiʻi Tree Canopy Viewer. When Kaimukī residents learned this, they decided to act.

What Kaimukī learned

Over five years, the community group Trees for Kaimukī made real progress toward a larger canopy, meeting and overcoming challenges large and small, from a pandemic to volunteer fatigue. Its guide, Enhancing Your Urban Tree Canopy: Lessons Learned from Trees for Kaimukī, sets out what it learned — and relearned — through each success and setback:

There is no magic formula or single approach that will work for every community every time.
None of the steps is done once and finished.
The lessons come in order but are interconnected: a continuing cycle of work and feedback that builds on itself and deepens the community's connection to its trees.

The group hopes its lessons will make other communities' journeys a little easier. Its work has been covered by the University of Hawaiʻi and local television, including a library tree planting, a rain garden blessing, a parklet, volunteers caring for tree wells, tree adoption events and the campaign's launch.

Resources

The guide points to others working on urban trees, including the Forest Service's Urban and Community Forestry Program and its urban tree canopy assessment, the Arbor Day Foundation's Alliance for Community Trees, the City and County of Honolulu's Urban Tree Plan, the Hawaiʻi Tree Canopy Viewer, the Tree Equity Score, and toolkits from Casey Trees, Vibrant Cities Lab, the Nature Conservancy and the Forests in Cities Network.

Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.