While huge live oak trees are a fixture of New Orleans neighborhoods like the Garden District, the city’s overall tree canopy has been in decline. (Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
To a casual visitor, New Orleans appears to be a city of trees. It’s home to both the largest urban wildlife refuge in the US and a city park larger than New York’s Central Park. Sprawling live oaks, some hundreds of years old, shade the city’s most famous avenues and neighborhoods; their enormous boughs, dripping with Spanish moss, are local icons.
But that picturesque image is a bit misleading.
“Look at basically any other street, and you don’t have any trees,” says Susannah Burley, the director of Sustaining Our Urban Landscape (SOUL), an urban reforestation nonprofit in New Orleans. A survey, published by SOUL as part of a plan for replanting the city, finds that less than 19% of New Orleans is shaded by tree canopy.
“Anybody who works with trees knows that trees are barometers of health and wealth,” says Burley. “This just proves what I think we’ve all known anecdotally for a long time.”
The tree survey found that New Orleans is less leafy than several Southern cities of greater population density, such as Miami, Atlanta and Memphis. That gap, according to SOUL’s findings, reflects both New Orleans’ environmental vulnerabilities and the city’s failures in planning and maintaining a healthy urban forest.
In part, the deforestation of New Orleans is a lingering legacy of Hurricane Katrina. Before the 2005 storm, which flooded some neighborhoods 10 feet deep in saltwater, trees shaded about 30% of city. Amanda Walker, urban forest manager with the city’s Department of Parks and Parkways, remembers how stretches of Elysian Fields Avenue, the wide boulevard that connects the city’s riverfront to Lake Pontchartrain to the north, was once “lined with beautiful, mature magnolia trees, which died immediately after Katrina.”
Fallen and submerged trees in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
Between 2005 and 2009, according to satellite surveys, the city lost hundreds of thousands of trees to storm and flood damage. Today, around two-thirds of neighborhoods have less than 10% canopy cover. Many of the sites of historic housing projects are almost entirely bare, with less than 2% coverage.
As in other cities, the lack of tree canopy tracks patterns of race and class: Lower-income neighborhoods tend to have fewer trees, as well as worse health outcomes. New Orleans has the worst urban heat island effect in the US, with the city as a whole about nine degrees hotter than the surrounding landscape. The effect is most pronounced in the deforested neighborhoods identified in SOUL’s report, such as Central City and the Irish Channel, which can be as much as 18 degrees hotter than leafier areas like the Garden District and Bayou St. John.
Credit: Sustaining Our Urban Landscape (SOUL)
In the years since Katrina, efforts have been made to restore the city’s treescape, as volunteer groups have embarked on planting campaigns across the city. Beyond their role in mitigating extreme heat, urban trees also aid in flood resilience and carbon sequestration. New Orleans’ 2017 climate action plan pledged to plant 40,000 trees by 2030 and achieve an overall 50% canopy coverage — an ambitious target that would catapult it to among the most forested major cities in the world.
The landscape architecture firm Spackman Mossop Michaels was hired to prepare the city’s reforestation plan. But no one had surveyed the city’s canopy, or measured the impact of the past 15 years of tree-planting work, says Emily Bullock, a principal with the firm. “We didn’t even know where we were starting from,” she says.
When SOUL looked at satellite images, the organization found that in spite of those efforts, the city was losing ground: Tree canopy dropped another 5% between 2009 and 2021. “We are no closer to 50% canopy than we were after Katrina,” Burley says.
The effects of the storm are still playing out, says Walker of Parks and Parkways. Live oaks often take years to show signs of damage, she says, and they’ve continued to die from saltwater exposure. Meanwhile, fresh hurricanes continue to exact a toll: Since Katrina, New Orleans has been raked by major storms like Zeta in 2020 and Ida in 2021.
An uprooted tree in front of a house in New Orleans in August 2012 as Hurricane Isaac battered the city and surrounding region. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)
Compounding the problem was the fact that the city failed to adequately invest in actively maintaining its stock of existing trees: According to the SOUL report, New Orleans spent 40% less per tree than the national average from 2014.
According to Hailey Bowen, a landscape architect with the city’s parks department, a property tax change passed in 2019, as well as $3.4 million from a budget surplus, will allow the city to catch up in coming years. “We have a two-year project in place to almost eliminate our backlog,” Bowen says. “We’ve had a lot of truck-versus-tree incidents, and if we can go out there and keep our canopy pruned to [Department of Transportation] specifications, we can greatly reduce the amount of trauma.”
Other trees get removed for utility and road work, or by private property owners. “If you look at other cities that have robust canopies, the common denominator is some kind of plan driving the reforestation,” Burley says. “Without a plan to tie it all together, it’s piecemeal.”
A typically treeless street in the Central City neighborhood. (Sustaining Our Urban Landscape (SOUL)/Spackman Mossop Michaels)
The plan’s first initiative focuses on neighborhood-level changes, as stepping stones to a citywide restoration. One of its first recommendations is to replant five neighborhoods to 10% canopy, a project that would involve 25,000 trees and about $12.5 million over five years. The pilot neighborhoods, which are spread across the city’s council districts, are among the hottest in the city and have a high proportion of residents living in poverty. Currently, the city and nonprofit partners plant about 3,000 trees a year, so to pull off the goal, the city’s planting and maintenance capacity would need to grow substantially.
But that’s within reach, city officials say, thanks to federal pandemic relief and infrastructure funding — New Orleans and SOUL recently applied for a grant from the Inflation Reduction Act to cover the first years of planting. The New Orleans’ city council has also formally endorsed SOUL’s recommendations, but hasn’t passed other specific legislation.
Some neighborhoods have plenty of room for new saplings, but in others, paved surfaces dominate. In parts of Central City, for instance, planting often involves carving through concrete to reach the soil. “You can’t do that with volunteers. That takes the people you see out there with diamond saws,” Burley says. “The blades cost $200 apiece and they last for like four cuts.”
A basketball court in Lafitte Greenway park in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans in 2021. Parts of the city that lack mature trees can be several degrees hotter than leafier neighborhoods. (Bryan Tarnowski/Bloomberg)
To achieve the plan’s equity goals, new trees will need to be dispersed widely throughout the city’s neighborhoods. “They’ve created a strategy that recognizes that some sites are going to be much more difficult than others, and that’s something you don’t always see,” says Larry Wiseman, senior advisor for urban forestry at the nonprofit American Forests.
But he worries that the plan lacks recommendations on how to slow tree removal on private property — often “the most politically contentious area of tree conservation.” Unless the city can encourage residents to plant and care for trees on private land, Wiseman says, “You’re pecking away at a larger problem by trying to do more in an area that will support much less.”
That could be a tall order in New Orleans, where infrastructure investments have long been made on racially polarized lines. As in other US cities that have faced community resistance over city-led greening efforts, many residents who spoke to SOUL during community outreach were wary of the potential damage caused by trees — and often had concerns related to historical lack of maintenance, like falling limbs or broken sidewalks.
Before anything can go in the ground, says Wes Michaels, founding principal of Spackman Mossop Michaels, they’ll need to better understand where people want to see more trees. “We need to increase the canopy where people can get the benefits,” Michaels says. “If we plant 1,000 trees out on the side of the highway, that’s great for carbon capture — but it doesn’t make anybody’s electricity bills lower.”