Climate action starts small: Try planting a tree

When the city of San Antonio adopted a Climate Action and Adaptation Plan a year ago, it was the culmination of work that started two years earlier, when Mayor Ron Nirenberg and a new City Council began their terms by signing onto the Paris Agreement.

Above all, San Antonio acknowledged climate change — that it's real, it's serious and it requires urgent action.

In adopting the CAAP, city leaders directed staff to make plans, develop policies and initiate programs to help San Antonio become “climate ready,” although climate activists said it didn't go far enough.

The plan projected that 1 million additional people would live in the San Antonio region by 2040, and that it would be both hotter and drier by then.

The work on CAPP hasn't all been highly technical or controversial. One part is decidedly low-tech: It calls for planting more trees.

At 10 a.m. today, at the headwaters of the San Antonio River near the campus of the University of the Incarnate Word, the Compassion Tree Project will plant a few trees as part of a global effort.

It's symbolic, a feel-good event on a fall morning. But it can be more than that: It can be a lesson to all of us, especially younger generations of San Antonio — in middle and high school — who will inherit a hotter climate.

The event will be livestreamed on the San Antonio Community Resource Directory's Facebook page.

Doug Melnick, the city's chief sustainability officer, will speak about urban forests and the benefits of reforestation.

“Trees accomplish so many benefits,” he said.

People don't fully appreciate it, but trees ease the impact of warmer and drier temperatures and improve air and water quality.

Trees absorb carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere. The heat melts polar ice and raises sea levels, causing flooding.

Trees soak up flood waters, slowing them down and limiting soil erosion. Trees absorb odors.

Trees are especially crucial in poorer neighborhoods, where they reduce the heat of pavement and keep pedestrians cool. In poor neighborhoods, more people get around on foot than in other parts of the city.

On the biodiversity side, trees provide habitat for a range of species.

Fruit and nut trees grown for the public to harvest isn't yet a thing in San Antonio, but it should be. It could become another way to combat food deserts and help feed the poor, the homeless and the hungry.

The Compassion Tree Project fits into the city's climate action plan, but the impetus for it was the mayor and council's decision to sign the international Charter for Compassion.

The compassion movement has borne other fruit, such as this summer's Compassionate Institute, which trained the city's first corps of compassionistas, who work in educational settings from pre-K to post graduate programs.

The Rev. Ann Helmke, the city's faith-based liaison, said the Compassion Tree Project got a healthy dose of competition from San Antonio's sister city of Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico. That city planted 32,000 trees in 2019 as part of the Charter for Compassion's 10-year plan to encourage the planting of 7.7 billion indigenous trees worldwide.

San Antonio's goal for 2020 was 20,000 trees — until the pandemic canceled springtime plantings and tree adoption events.

City forester Cathy Justice said the city Parks and Recreation Department has planted 6,500 trees this year — more than 3,300 of them in parks, on city properties and through the neighborhood tree program. The department has given away an additional 3,200 trees at public events.

Justice said city officials still aspire to reach the 20,000 goal. If you plant a tree on your own, you can help San Antonio get there. Email the news to compassiontree@sanantonio.gov.

The fall tree-planting season has begun, and on Oct. 17 Parks and Recreation will give away trees at the Mission Marquee Plaza farmer's market on the South Side from 10 a.m. until supplies run out. It will be a drive-through event to minimize contact.

Helmke likes to say that planting a tree is symbolic of the city's efforts to plant compassion.

It's a way to practice compassion. We do that with every live oak or Texas mountain laurel we put into the ground.

This year, Texas Arbor Day falls on Friday, Nov. 6, a fine deadline to give yourself to hold your own feel-good event in your backyard and plant a tree.