Abstract Book of the 6th World Conference on Climate Change and Global Warming
Year: 2025
[PDF]
Beyond City-level Canopy Cover: A Contextualized Tree Equity Score (TES) Framework for Greening Indian Cities
Ayushi Dhar, Saikat Kumar Paul, Ankit Kumar Senapati
ABSTRACT:
Urban trees offer a wide range of ecosystem services that enhance urban livability. However, tree cover equity – the fair distribution of trees and their associated benefits – remains a neglected dimension in Indian urban policy. Current initiatives, such as the Smart City Mission, emphasize the recreational role of open spaces, while greening programs like the Nagar Van Yojana focus primarily on increasing carbon sequestration, but within existing parks or gardens. These approaches overlook the spatial distribution of tree cover across neighbourhoods, creating inequities in localised ecosystem services that directly affect public health such as urban heat mitigation. This study introduces a contextualized Tree Equity Score (TES) framework for Indian cities that integrates three key dimensions: existing tree cover, heat exposure, and socio-economic vulnerability at the ward scale. Bhubaneswar serves as the case city due to its high overall tree cover yet heterogeneous urban fabric combining both planned and organic settlements. Using remote sensing and publicly available datasets, TES values ranged from 61 to 100, revealing significant intra-city disparities. Unlike the conventional TES that relies on broad climatic zones and building density, our modified approach incorporates plantable area derived from land cover classification to reflect realistic greening potential. Accounting for land constraints increased the range of inequity but raised the average TES from 81 to 89 due to reduced target tree covers. Spatially, distinct contrasts emerged between the planned, Old Town, and outgrowth areas, with the latter showing low tree cover and high vulnerability, making them priority zones for urban greening.
Keywords: Environmental Justice, Heat Mitigation, Socio-Economic Vulnerability, Tree Cover Inequity, Urban Greening