Promoting Green Infrastructure

Background

Pittsburgh faces a number of environmental and social challenges including urban heat, landslides, economic and racial inequity, air pollution, and aging infrastructure. The objective of this project is to leverage green infrastructure, primarily trees, to assist and reduce risks from these challenges, while also reducing carbon emissions.

Details

The problem we’d like to solve with SUDS is that we would like to calculate and communicate the benefits of trees to better communicate with residents, community groups, and funders so that they better understand the opportunity to plant trees to improve carbon capture, CO2 absorption, and water / flood management.

The work will focus on creating a first line of defense to help prepare Pittsburgh’s most vulnerable neighborhoods to withstand challenges from climate shocks and address underlying endemic stresses. The project’s intended impacts include, but are not limited to, increasing carbon sequestration, mitigating urban heat, reducing resident energy costs, managing risks from severe storms, improving air quality, and increasing access to green spaces.

This project will leverage existing data in new ways to create actionable intelligence for city officials, nonprofits, and Pittsburgh residents. In particular, utilizing enhanced aerial and street-level images to overlay new data and artificial intelligence to help the city understand the potential of enhanced green infrastructure while ascertaining the health of existing trees and other green assets.

The work done in Pittsburgh can be scaled and implemented in other cities to address similar challenges. The team includes city officials from the Department of Planning and the Department of Forestry, community-based organizations and nonprofits such as Tree Pittsburgh and the UrbanKind Institute, and research and data partners.

Success Measures

We want to produce data evidence that demonstrate the monetary value of increasing tree canopy in Pittsburgh. This helps support the City’s grander environmental goals, including the reduction of carbon emission by 50% and the maintenance of at least 30% tree canopy in each neighborhood.

Project Impacts

I&P plans to use the results and feed it into the Green Urban Scenarios Framework to produce simulations of increased tree canopy in Pittsburgh. The data will support the City in public policy creation and tree-planting campaigns.