Urban forest management plans: turning goals into action

Urban trees are everywhere—lining streets, shading playgrounds and beautifying neighbourhoods. Sustaining that canopy, however, requires more than just hitting planting targets.

That’s why municipalities across Canada are developing urban forest management plans (UFMPs): strategies that define how trees are governed, maintained and protected over time.

Our guide, ‘Creating an Urban Forest Management Plan For Your Community’, supports this work, helping municipalities set clear, long-term goals for their urban forests. 

With a background in business management, Miles Peart is the Manager of Urban Forestry at the City of Vaughan. He has led numerous forestry projects, including Vaughan’s first-ever UFMP; he describes the plan as a “playbook” that advances stewardship of “green infrastructure assets.”

Pulling from the Tree Cities of the World program, co-led by the United Nations, Peart outlines core pillars for urban forest governance: knowing your tree inventory—including location, species, size and more—setting an ordinance to govern trees in the jurisdiction, allocating adequate resources at the city-level to create and implement the UFMP, and establishing clear responsibility and accountability between staff.

A successful UFMP requires coordination between several municipal departments, from housing to transport. “There’s nothing better than the UFMP exercise to bring everybody together to highlight the importance of trees as assets,” Peart says. 
 

The pressures shaping urban forestry, from climate to housing 

Jeff Boone, Project Manager at the City of Saskatoon, has worked in urban forestry since 2006. He says that Saskatoon’s UFMP, approved in 2021, was developed largely in-house, with consultant support on tree protection and canopy targets.

Creating the plan was no simple matter; the prairies see major temperature swings—from plus to minus 40—and shifting weather patterns, where a single storm can wipe out thousands of trees.

As well as dealing with extreme weather, Saskatoon’s trees are mostly made up of elm and ash, Boone says. This lack of biodiversity poses a risk to the city’s canopy; Boone is particularly concerned about Dutch elm disease, a fungal infection clogging the trees’ water systems.

The pressures on the canopy are not only environmental. In Vaughan—one of Canada’s fastest-growing municipalities—another pressure is housing demand. Peart is candid about the tension: existing trees aren’t always in the right place when it comes to future developments — for example, they might stand in the way of a new sidewalk being installed.     “Our jobs are really to look after the trees for our grandchildren,” he says. “The decisions we make here today have to strike that balance between many competing priorities.”

How a community manages its urban forest will determine whether future generations inherit neighbourhoods that are cooler, more resilient to climate risks such as flooding, and more supportive of public health and wellbeing.
 

Creating a strategic urban forest document that accounts for this “wide variety of circumstances” can be a challenge, Boone adds—but like Peart, Boone has found that UFMPs are a “very, very useful document in laying a foundation for internal departments working together.”

Thanks to Saskatoon’s UFMP, when Council approves a plan—such as an active transportation strategy—Boone’s team are more likely to be at the steering table from the get-go, fostering greater collaboration when it comes to tackling issues like building more sidewalks. While conflict remains inevitable, “working together at the outset can at least smooth the edges of the conflict a lot,” Boone says.
 

Equity depends on who is involved, and how

Successfully implementing a UFMP is no small feat, and it’s important to celebrate milestones. “[It’s] the best opportunity to engage with all kinds of stakeholders,” Peart says, from City councillors to residents to community partners.

Those community partners are critical to the sustainability of a UFMP.

“Don’t just draw a box and think, ‘this is what urban forest planning is,’” says Peyton Meters, Engagement Manager at pipikwan pêhtâkwan, an Edmonton-based Indigenous public relations and engagement agency. “Let that bloom and let those seeds get planted from the different partnerships you make.”

For Meters, that means moving beyond simply informing or consulting communities. Referencing the International Association for Public Participation spectrum, she encourages municipalities to work toward deeper involvement and collaboration, where residents are not only reacting to plans, but helping shape and carry them forward.

Meters adds that many communities are already running urban forest activities, and that low participation is often a reflection of how organizations engage with communities, and not whether people care. “Everything starts with relationship first, and then the work can happen next,” she says.  
 

Saskatoon offers a practical example. Boone explains that residents had previously been required to water city-planted trees placed in front of their homes during the first period after planting. As a recent UFMP outcome, the city removed that requirement “so we could create more equal access to that tree-planting opportunity,” he says.

The trees didn’t change, but the expectation did. By removing the watering obligation, the city reduced the burden on residents who might not have had the time or capacity to take that on.

Peart brings it back to basics. In municipal work, he says, staff are “in service to people”—not only to trees. Urban forest decisions, in that view, need to make sense in everyday terms: safety, public health, equity, careful use of tax dollars and resilience in the face of climate change.

Looking ahead, when it comes to creating UFMPs, Meters says that Indigenous worldviews encourage planners to think beyond today’s challenges. “We're not only thinking about what's going to be important for your municipality here and now,” she says, “but for the seven generations in the future.”     
 

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