Cities are warming faster than their rural surroundings. But the ecosystem support provided by urban forestry is often omitted from climate policies due to the difficulty in assigning to it a credible monetary sum. Lu Han, Stephan Heblich, Christopher Timmins and Yanos Zylberberg estimate the value of urban trees. By exploiting an ecological catastrophe - an infestation of exotic beetles in the trees of Toronto, Canada - the authors are able to quantify the ecological and economic value of urban forestry, providing detailed evidence that a city's trees reduce energy consumption and moderate temperatures during heatwaves.

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25 April 2024

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Vox EU

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https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/cool-cities-value-urban-trees

This Blog is published under the centre's Urban programme.

This publication comes under the following theme: Urban inequality: The role and determinants of urban productivity