The Center for Watershed Protection
Advises City of Raleigh on Tree Protection
The City of Raleigh is one of the fastest growing urban areas in North Carolina
with goals to develop with environmental protections to improve and protect
air and water quality. The City recognized the importance of the urban forest
as an integral strategy to achieve these goals. In 2019, the City secured the
services of the Center for Watershed Protection to determine and recom-
mend how the conservation and/or expansion of forest and tree canopy during
development can help to improve water and air quality. This work is intended
to address the following goal identified in the Growth and Natural Resources
Focus Area of the City's Strategic Plan: "Encourage a diverse, vibrant built envi-
ronment that preserves and protects the community's natural resources while
encouraging sustainable growth that complements existing development."
The Center partnered with Brown and Caldwell to com-
plete several research tasks. These included:
• Evaluating the City of Raleigh's existing regulations and programs impacting
tree conservation and planting against established benchmarks, using
the Center's Forest-Friendly Code and Ordinance Worksheet (COW).
• Summarizing the extent to which the City of Raleigh is uti-
lizing the North Carolina Statute enabling legislation to protect
urban tree canopy during development/redevelopment.
• Synthesizing the current state-of-the science on the relationship
between urban forests and their water and air quality benefits.
• Reviewing models that can be used to quantify the water
and air quality benefits of the urban forest.
The results of the Forest-Friendly COW find that the City has a strong program
in place for tree conservation and to expand its urban forest, while identifying
areas to improve or strengthen its tree conservation efforts, thus increasing
the ability to improve local air and water quality. Further, the Center's team
made recommendations for the City on development of a modeling frame-
work to quantify the effects of the urban forest on air quality and water quality
and quantity, and how future land use changes may impact these benefits.
These recommendations provide the City with a path forward that includes
next steps, a timeline, and costs that can be scaled to the City's avail-
able resources in subsequent phases. A Technical Advisory Committee
comprised of six subject matter experts in hydrology, modeling, and for-
estry provided review and input on all aspects of this project.
The City is in the process of discussing the results of the regulatory
review with its multi-departmental strategic planning group with an eye
to advance recommendations from this project. The City is also exploring
a possible nexus with its Communitywide Climate Action Plan.
—Neely Law, Ph.D., Center for Watershed Protection
Director of Education and Training
www.urban-forestry.com 19
