Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has released New York City’s first-ever Urban Forest Plan, a citywide strategy to grow the five boroughs’ tree canopy from roughly 23% today to 30% by 2040 — with the steepest gains targeted at the neighborhoods that have the least shade right now.

The plan, unveiled April 21 by the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice alongside NYC Parks, lays out a shift in how the city plants trees. Rather than responding one-by-one to resident requests — historically the default approach — the city will divide New York into more than 400 planting zones, filling every viable site, removing dead trees and stumps, and prioritizing blocks that experience the worst summer heat, according to THE CITY, which covered the rollout in Cambria Heights, Queens.

“New York has always been defined by the dreams we dare to build together,” Mamdani said at the announcement, “Today, we’re planting those dreams in the soil itself.”

An Old Inequality, Written in Tree Cover

The gap the plan is meant to close isn’t new, and it isn’t random. City data shows tree canopy in the most heat-vulnerable neighborhoods currently sits at about 19%, compared to roughly 26% in the rest of the city, according to figures presented to the City Council by Chief Climate Officer Louise Yeung and reported by THE CITY.

That divide traces back nearly a century. In the 1930s, the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation graded American neighborhoods for mortgage risk, systematically marking Black and immigrant communities as hazardous — the practice known as redlining. Those maps shaped decades of disinvestment: fewer public resources, fewer parks, and, researchers have found, fewer trees.

A U.S. Forest Service study of 37 U.S. metro areas found that neighborhoods once graded “D” under HOLC’s system — mostly home to racial and ethnic minorities — average about 23% tree canopy today, while neighborhoods graded “A” — predominantly white — average nearly double that, around 43%. A more recent analysis of five cities including New York found formerly redlined areas continue to have significantly lower tree cover than the rest of their cities, and that municipal tree-planting goals have historically been met more often in wealthier neighborhoods — even when official policy called for equal treatment.

The consequence isn’t just aesthetic. Fewer trees means less shade and higher surface temperatures, and NYC’s own Health Department has estimated that more than 500 New Yorkers die prematurely each summer because of extreme heat — a risk concentrated in the same low-canopy neighborhoods, according to reporting from Hoodline.

The Plan’s Fine Print

The Urban Forest Plan is New York’s first with an official target date, and it comes with some institutional teeth: the New York State Urban Forestry Council notes the goal is codified into Local Law 148, meaning it’s meant to survive beyond any single mayor and will be revisited every ten years.

What it doesn’t yet have is a dedicated budget. City Hall has not earmarked new funding specifically for the canopy expansion, telling reporters the effort will rely on existing program budgets and “creatively leveraging funds from government and private sources,” per THE CITY. A 2022 estimate from a local environmental advocacy group put the cost of planting enough trees to hit a 30% canopy goal at roughly $500 million citywide. As a candidate, Mamdani had pledged to devote 1% of the city budget to the Parks Department; his first preliminary budget proposed less than half that, a cut of about $34 million.

Advocates who worked on the plan say that funding gap is the real test ahead. Tami Lin-Moges of the Nature Conservancy’s cities program, which was part of a 200-plus member coalition that pushed for the plan, said the 2040 target is welcome but depends entirely on the money that follows it.

Roughly 8,000 New Yorkers weighed in on the plan through a public questionnaire before it was finalized, according to the NYS Urban Forestry Council.

NOTICE News will continue following the Urban Forest Plan’s rollout and funding fight as the city’s budget process continues.