Money Does Grow on Trees

Community forests are vital to our communities’ ecosystems by offering many benefits including providing shade and cooling temperatures, reducing stormwater runoff and flooding, removing pollutants from the air and water, enhancing residents’ overall health, and improving the quality of life in our communities. These benefits, however, can only be realized with healthy mature trees, which take decades for newly planted trees to reach when the conditions are right.

Growing trees to maturity not only takes time, it also has costs. Meanwhile, people say money doesn’t grow on trees. That is not incorrect. But studies have shown that trees help to reduce government expenditures and increase tax revenues in many different ways. So, money does grow on trees, at least for government agencies.

This talk provides resources to green industry professionals on how to persuade denying politicians and budget makers. Avoid talking about the big-picture benefits, the niceties, or the ideological concepts that seem decorative and nonessential to these non-believers. Instead, talk directly about tax dollars, a thing they definitely care about. It is two-fold: How do trees save money? And how do trees generate more tax revenue? All the topics we will discuss can be directly connected to line items in a government budget book. If you can directly connect the benefits of trees with a line item in the budget, you will be surprised!

For example, instead of focusing on how planting trees improves the environmental injustice situation, emphasizing on the wealth of residents and property tax revenue created with improved canopy coverage. We will also discuss the relationship of canopy and crime rates (law enforcement costs), sales taxes, and human health costs.

1 CEU/PDH approved by ISA, LACES