Currently, Vancouver has 300,000 urban park trees. The city aims to plant an additional 150,000 trees by 2020. The trees will absorb carbon dioxide to mitigate climate change, help manage rainwater, provide wildlife habitat, provide access to nature and create healthy communities (shade, fruit, and stress reduction) and create jobs for the local economy.

The city aims to limit the number of healthy mature trees being removed due to new developments, create an urban forest inventory system, and develop strategies for ongoing public engagement and connections to stewardship programs.

Currently, Vancouver is the only Canadian city with an elected park board, which operates over 240 parks. This includes the 404-acre Stanley Park, which is home to ancient cedars, wildlife, and rainforests. The city plans to build on this legacy as part of the Green City Action Plan, which also includes creating a “strong local economy, vibrant and inclusive neighborhoods and an internationally recognized city that meets the needs of generations to come.”

Vancouver is a globally significant area for big trees. The city is surrounded by lush temperate rainforest that to this day contains trees over 1300 years old and up to 86 m tall. Only 200 years ago, the entire Vancouver region was a swath of towering old-growth forest. In the 1850s, settlers began to arrive in search of gold, then lumber, and as the immigrant population grew by the 1880s, large-scale forest clearing began. Many pockets of old-growth forest were spared: ancient trees can be found around UBC, Stanley Park, Capilano, Maple Ridge, Lynn Valley, and up in the higher elevations around Vancouver, where trees still stand over 90m tall.

In the 1960s, Vancouver’s downtown was at risk of being razed for an eight-lane freeway from the Trans-Canada Highway through the East End. However, a historic protest movement of neighborhood residents turned the tide, and finally, the plan was shelved. Today, Vancouver has the smallest per capita carbon footprint of any city in North America. Moreover, in 2011, the city government drew up the Greenest City Action Plan to realize its aim of becoming a carbon-neutral metropolis, with an ecological footprint reduced by one-third by 2020. To further this aim, the strategy highlights the importance of maintaining the urban forest under the banner of “protect, plant and manage” the canopy. So far, Vancouver holds second place in the Treepedia ranking, an MIT project in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, in which the researchers calculated the Green View Index (GVI) using Google Street View panoramas. Vancouver’s percentage of canopy coverage is 25.9% and growing.