Carbon Accounting for New York City's Natural Area Forests

Forest assessments and carbon accounting are common approaches used to quantify the value of trees and their contribution to mitigating these negative effects across different landscapes. In cities, assessments of forests, and the ecological benefits that they can provide have not been rigorously quantified beyond the scale of the entire city, thus making it difficult to understand how different types of urban green space contribute to meeting city sustainability goals. Urban forested natural areas often have greater tree density compared to trees planted in designed cityscapes suggesting that natural area forests could be an important carbon sink for cities to understand. To our knowledge the amount of carbon stored and sequestered in urban forested natural areas has never been estimated. This report is the first comprehensive carbon budget created for an urban forested natural area using field-collected data.

In a nutshell, this resource offers:

• Analyses of field-collected data that compares carbon storage rates of street trees, landscaped parks, and urban forested natural areas in New York City.
• A methodology to measure carbon storage in urban forested natural areas.
• A comparison of rural areas to urban forested natural areas' carbon storage.

How to use this resource:

• As justification for investment in urban forested natural areas as a natural climate solution.
• As a citation for grants or reports to show the carbon-storage value and potential of urban forested natural areas.

Author: Clara Pregitzer, Chloe Hana, Sarah Charlop-Powers, Mark Bradford

Date published: February 2020

Point of contact: Clara Pregitzer, Deputy Director of Conservation Science, Natural Areas Conservancy, clara.pregitzer@naturalareasnyc.org

Citation: Pregitzer, C.C., Hana, C., Charlop-Powers, S, M.A. Bradford. 2020. Carbon Accounting for New York City Natural Area Forests. Natural Areas Conservancy, New York, NY.

Resource is available online here.