Publication: Trees, Cities, and a Green Future: Connecting Urban Forestry Policymakers, Practitioners, and Experts across Central Asia and the Globe for Landscape Restoration and Climate Resilience
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2023-12-01
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2024-06-10
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Urban forestry has evolved into a multifaceted discipline, encompassing far more than aesthetic landscaping. As a cornerstone of environmental stewardship, it includes strategic planning and comprehensive management to optimize the environmental, social, and economic benefits of trees. This involves the conservation of various green spaces—parks, riverbanks, vacant lots— to enhance urban life. It adds economic and property value, creates jobs, and offers costsaving benefits such as reduced infrastructure needs and lower energy costs by providing shade. Social advantages include improved public health through recreational spaces, stress reduction, air pollution reduction, and promotion of physical activity. Additionally, the environmental impacts of urban forestry are profound: mitigating climate change, enhancing air and water quality, reducing erosion, and promoting biodiversity. The World Bank’s series of webinars ‘Trees, Cities, and a Green Future’ were held from January through July 2023 to address the pressing need for awareness, education, and collaborative action in the field of urban tree management; especially considering its multifaceted importance in modern cities and unique relevance in Central Asia. It was cohosted by the World Bank’s Environment, Natural Resources, and Blue Economy and Urban, Resilience, and Land global practices. The series represented a thematic set of learning events curated as an online knowledge exchange platform that aimed to connect policy makers, practitioners, and experts across Central Asia and the globe, all focused on advancing urban forestry and greening best practices for urban land restoration and climate resilience in cities and regional development projects.
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“World Bank. 2023. Trees, Cities, and a Green Future: Connecting Urban Forestry Policymakers, Practitioners, and Experts across Central Asia and the Globe for Landscape Restoration and Climate Resilience. Knowledge Exchange Series: A Compendium of Proceedings. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/41683 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
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