Right Tree, Right Place

Trees are often pointed to as a panacea for climate change, the most cost-effective environmental engineering we can do to cool the planet. The t-shirt slogan/ ancient Chinese proverb is inescapable: "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." However, my time following grasslands scientists on Twitter, back when it was a useful tool for networking and research, made me look more skeptically at trees. See my blog post from 2019 with more links about the relative importance of grasslands and kelp forests as carbon sinks. I still chuckle at the quip by one scientist: "Trees are dorks who put loads of their carbon aboveground." 

Mount Diablo sunset, photo credit: me

Besides being prone to burning and unhelpfully releasing lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, trees can be a problem because you can't just plant any tree anywhere, and people don't always take the time to think ahead. A July 2025 Guardian UK article "How a £1.5bn ‘wildlife-boosting’ bypass became an environmental disaster" describes just such an instance, where a biodiversity corridor along an English highway instead turned into a dead zone, where nearly all the tree saplings died: "they had planted the wrong species in the wrong place." National Highways, the supervising agency, had to admit nature was left worse-off after the project, with the death of nearly all of the 860,000 trees they planted.

Meanwhile, I spent most of the last five years working on wildfire mitigation in California, where the slogan "right tree, right place" is repeated by all the players (government, utilities). In particular, the utilities want you to think ahead before planting a tree: sometimes they get left holding the bag when someone's poorly placed or poorly maintained tree comes into contact with bare wire and there's an ignition. All three major investor-owned electrical utilities in California have repositories of information on how to select the right tree and place it at a safe distance from electrical infrastructure.

 

Seen in a friend's garden, photo credit: me

Here are some tree planting planning resources the utilities point to:

• CalPoly's SelecTree Tool (which includes a filter for California native plants and "has fall color")
• The Arbor Day Foundation's Tree Wizard Tool

And then there are the utility-specific pages:

• PG&E "Planting Safely" (scroll down to Safe Planting Resources)
• SCE "Power Lines and Trees" (and the two-page 2019 brochure "Right Tree, Right Place") 
• SDG&E "Plant the right tree in the right place"

Some other resources you might want to reference:

• The California Native Plant Society's Calscape Search Page - to locate native trees and shrubs to suit your needs
• The National Cooperative Soil Survey's Web Soil Survey - to learn about your soil's characteristics

On a related note, researchers published a study in Nature Communications last year (2024) looking at where global warming from reducing surface reflectivity (albedo) from increasing tree canopy can partially or even completely counteract the cooling benefit of increased carbon storage in trees. It turns out "[i]n most locations, these changes in albedo offset or even negate the carbon removal benefits" (Hasler et al. 2024 "Accounting for albedo change to identify climate-positive tree cover restoration").

The researchers produced a spatial data set for land managers to help them determine how much the decreased reflectivity from additional tree cover might impact the carbon removal benefit of a reforestation project. Without taking the reflectivity reduction impact into account, land managers might be overestimating the carbon removal benefit of reforestation projects "anywhere from 20 to 81%" (as described in the Nature Conservancy summary of the study "New maps help decision-makers factor albedo into tree-planting strategies").

If you don't have an easy way to use a spatial data set, you can estimate a reforestation project's impact using the Nature Conservancy's Naturebase mapping tool, which "integrates albedo into both its reforestation and avoided forest conversion estimates."

My backyard Bradford Pear tree, photo credit: me

Remember - trees are dorks! They burn and they absorb sunlight which both warm the planet. Plant them strategically! 

Climate Medicine

Over the past three years my extracurricular research has focused more on the COVID-19 pandemic news and related news from the public health field and less on emerging climate change adaptation policy. I've been a habitual follower of the UCSF Grand Rounds COVID-19 Update (initially in the beginning of the pandemic a weekly update, changing to every two weeks and then every month). This month I tuned in for the COVID-19 Update and found instead an interesting lecture by Dr. Kari Nadeau on "Climate Medicine" (a new term for me):

The 30th Annual Alice Hamilton Lecture: Climate Medicine and Occupational and Environmental Health (59:16) - May 11, 2023

Dr. Kari Nadeau is the Chair of the Dept. of Environmental Health at the Harvard School of Public Health (though until recently she was on the faculty at Stanford) and a specialist in adult and pediatric allergy and asthma. She presented a jam-packed lecture on the many impacts of climate change on public health and what a medical practitioner can do in response.

First, in his intro the curator of Grand Rounds Dr. Bob Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF, noted that UCSF's Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine was recently renamed the Division of Occupational, Environmental, and Climate Medicine.

Dr. Nadeau starts talking about climate change impacts on public health around 7:12 (after she gallops through the evidence that climate change is real).

I wish I could get a better version of this slide: 

"Global Climate Change: Pathways from greenhouse gas emissions to climate medicine"

Dr. Nadeau does a very thorough job reviewing all the major public health issues exacerbated by climate change including (in the order she mentions them):

•  Wildfires

She references an epidemiological paper on the connection between asthma and wildfire smoke in 2015 wildfire season, pointing to disproportionate impact on women, the elderly, and the low/middle income communities: Critical Review of Health Impacts of Wildfire Smoke Exposure (Reid, et al. Environ Health Persp, 2016).

I found a 45-slide PPT by Dr. Nadeau "Wildfires and Health" from 2019 from her time at Stanford that

focuses on the California case, landing with the summary line "There is no safe distance from a wildfire." (Download the PPT)

• Dust storms
• Pollens and molds (focusing on the Bay Area - the pollen season has increased by two weeks over the past 17 years and plants are producing more pollens)
• "Thunderstorm asthma" in Australia - something about how the electricity from the storms breaks the pollen into smaller parts, causing asthma in people who previously didn't have it
• Extreme heat
• Flooding, including toxins in water and fungal/bacterial overgrowth
• Waterborne and tickborne diseases  
• Air pollution (including wildfire smoke, dust)
• Drought, impacts on water and food supplies, plants becoming less nutritious 
• Infectious disease increase and biodiversity loss

Then she backs up and talks about secondary impacts a little.

• Displacement in climate change-related migration

She referenced a new online mapping tool - UNEP's Strata - that models potential displacement from climate change impacts. UNEP explains: "Strata is a geospatial data platform that supports practitioners and policymakers to identify and track environmental and climate stresses potentially driving threats to peace and security."

• Disproportionate impact on women/pregnant people and children

She referenced a new UNICEF report "The Climate Crisis is a Child Rights Crisis" (Aug. 2021).

This report introduces the Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI), "which uses data to generate new global evidence on how many children are currently exposed to climate and environmental hazards, shocks and stresses."

• Occupational health issues:
• Wildfire firefighters (10-yr shorter life span than average due to toxic exposure on the job, outside of risks from doing an emergency-related job)
• Farm workers (from heat stress- there are particular kinds of kidney disease associated with farm workers due to dehydration)
• Construction workers (with particular impacts in the U.S. on Hispanic people and people from Mexico, undoubtedly also true for farm workers)
• Workers doing flood clean-up

Then she took one more step back and looked at the "systems" view - concurrent stressors over a person's lifetime add up. I learned a new word here: "exposome" (the totality of internal and external exposures across the lifespan that affect human health). You have to think about climate change in the context of the exposome.

She then  (28:10) pivoted to talk about solutions, how doctors can support their patients and give them tools to protect themselves, like, what masks and filters can help against wildfire smoke.

She then (34:38)  introduced the topic of climate change x mental health.

She pointed to the article that shows positive returns to cognition from greenery from a study done in Melbourne: Associations of traffic-related air pollution and greenery with academic outcomes among primary schoolchildren (Claesen, et al. Environmental Research, 2021).

She also pointed to a pilot study on biodiversity, the immune system, and microbiota done with children in Finland: Biodiversity intervention enhances immune regulation and health-associated commensal microbiota among daycare children (Roslund, et al. Science Advances, 2020). That study found that immunity was better in children exposed to more green space.

Continuing on with her focus on solutions, she mentioned the new trend of electrifying school buses.

She ended with the potential advocacy role of health care providers - they are seen as a trusted source of information by patients and should feel empowered to talk about the connection between health stressors and climate change when counseling patients.

Dr. Wachter and Dr. Nadeau ended with a little Q&A. She noted the importance of the work of the Governor's Office in California to electrify vehicles in the state and other bright spots on the horizon.

Fire and Plague

California has a million acres on fire right now, caused by a rare summer thunderstorm between August 15 and 19 that brought on 10,800 lightning strikes, causing 367 fires. (See an incredible composite time-lapse video taken from space showing the sparkle of lightning storms and the subsequent blossoming of fires.) Some fires are being allowed to just burn-- there aren't enough fire fighters to contain them all. 

Photo: Jeff Head (CC PDM 1.0)

At the same time, Covid-19 has been spreading across the state over the past six months, caused by an incredibly dangerous novel coronavirus that has adapted such that infected people are MOST infectious right before symptoms become evident, and it seems from population studies that half of infected people are asymptomatic but still able to spread the disease. The secondary impacts of both of these crises include skyrocketing unemployment, housing insecurity, and all of the mental health impacts of people being trapped in their homes by wildfire smoke and fear of infection. 

Add to that the numerous outrageous attacks by police and the police-adjacent in the last few months on unarmed African Americans (including Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, now Jacob Blake) and the protesters coming out to show solidarity (including Summer Taylor  -- now adding two killed yesterday in Kenosha, Wisconsin -- a full 32 deaths associated with policy brutality protests between the end of May and now)... 

And add to that the ever-slimmer likelihood that the U.S. will have a presidential election free of significant tampering by the current administration and its cronies come November... 

it's a stressful moment.

One of my coping strategies is to treat it all as a subject for study, and share what I find out with my friends to help them feel grounded in what passes for facts. I want to park a few helpful links related to the wildfire crisis here.

California Dept. of Public Health one-stop online resource center for Covid-19 + wildfire + extreme heat: Guidance and Resources for COVID-19, Climate Change, and Health Equity

A few researchers from Stanford’s Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research, Kari Nadeau and Mary Prunicki, answer some questions about Covid-19 x wildfire smoke: Stanford researchers discuss wildfires’ health impacts (by Rob Jordan, Aug. 26, 2020). TL,DR: people with higher exposure to air pollution are more vulnerable to Covid-19. 

Covid-19 is not an equal-opportunity infector: it is hitting low-income communities and communities of color far harder than other demographic groups (here's a very readable article on the subject, Moving From The Five Whys To Five Hows: Addressing Racial Inequities In COVID-19 Infection And Death, from July 2, 2020, on the health policy blog Health Affairs). It is well-documented that these communities have higher exposure to air pollution across the state. In particular: Wildfire Smoke Poses Greatest Risk to Low-Income Residents, People of Color, Experts Say (by Sarah Mizes-Tan at Cap Radio, Aug. 20, 2020)

The news reports percent containment in regard to wildfire. This is not the same as percent extinguished. What does "containment" mean when it comes to wildfire? Check out this helpful thread from Michael Wara, Director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment; he also serves on California's Commission on Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery.

How is climate change contributing to California's wildfires? Some answers surface in this conversation with climate scientist Daniel Swain on KQED's Forum by Michael Krasny (43 min.):  The Link Between Climate Change and Wildfires (Aug. 25, 2020). In this interview he emphasizes the need to return to the landscape a fire regime closer to the frequent, low-intensity controlled fire regime that was used to maintain the land under management by California Native communities.

More Daniel Swain explaining the link between climate change and wildfire, including the factoid that as climate impacts go, wildfire might not be our biggest emerging problem: California’s Climate Tinderbox: A Scientist Explains the Fire Crisis (by Eric Roston, Aug. 25, 2020)

From that interview:

We’re currently developing a statewide disaster-contingency scenario for an extreme flood event. It’s the most foreseeable disaster that everyone's going to say came by surprise. Think about what happened in 1862 in The Great Flood [a "megaflood" that swamped large swathes of California for 6 months: read more]. We know it's already physically possible, since it already happened without climate change. Today it would be a multi-trillion dollar disaster. We already showed that we think that the likelihood of this happening over the next 40 years is about 50-50. Over the next 60 years, it’s right around 100%.

Read Dr. Swain's Aug. 21, 2020, blog post about the recent lightning storm and wildfires here.

Climate Change, Russia's Fires and the Present Uprising in Egypt

When Russia's fires last year led to the curtailing of wheat exports, it was predicted that world food prices would spike and inflame political conflict.

Climate events inflating food prices is just one example of how climate change is going to drive political conflict. Water and energy are also going to see price spikes that drive conflict.

Right now as we watch Egyptians struggle to transition from totalitarianism to democracy, remember that one of the main sparks behind this revolution was not some new societal level of enlightenment, but a new level of desperation driven by food prices.

On Feb. 3, 2011, PRI's Peter Thomson wrote about the Russia fire/ wheat scarcity/ revolution connection.

From "High food prices in Egypt and climate change":

Food price inflation in Egypt was over 20 percent last year. In particular, there’s been a big squeeze from the rising global price of wheat. New York global investment manager Vincent Truglia says depending on how you measure it, the price of wheat went up between 50 and 70 percent in 2010.
[...]

Egypt is among the world’s largest importers of wheat, and the global wheat market received a number of nasty shocks recently. The worst came last summer, when Russia was hit by an unprecedented drought and heat wave that destroyed 40 percent of its wheat harvest.

Russia abruptly banned exports, and Egypt, which had just signed a big wheat deal with Russia, was left scrambling.

The Egyptian government has tried to keep a lid on wheat prices through subsidies and rationing. But Truglia says anxiety over food prices is the key problem facing Egypt today.

And some look further up the chain of events, and trace the problem at least in part to climate change.

“I think we are seeing some of the early effects of climate change on food security,” says veteran environmental analyst Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute. In particular, Brown says the heat wave that led to the collapse of Russia’s wheat harvest was no ordinary weather event.

“If someone had told me that there was likely to be a heat wave in Russia in which the average temperature would be 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm — that’s pushing the envelope. I mean FOUR degrees would be a lot.”
[...]


Vicken Checherian, writing for Opendemocracy.net, wrote on Jan. 26, 2011 (The Arab Crisis: Food, Energy, Water, Justice), about other nearby countries taking measures to try to prevent food price-driven revolution: "Even Saudi Arabia is taking precautions; the kingdom aims to double its wheat reserves to 1.4 million tons, enough to satisfy demand for a year." He also points out that food price-driven revolution hasn't historically led to democracy in the region:

The rise of food and energy prices sparked popular demonstrations in Algeria in 1988 and Jordan in 1989. When the authorities could not suppress the demonstrations by pure repression, and could not reduce the prices for lack of means, they chose to open up a closed political system: single-party rule was ended in Algeria in 1989, and in Jordan restrictions on the media and the work of political parties were lifted. In neither case did this political opening lead to sustainable institutions and democratisation: Algeria eventually degenerated into a fratricidal war, Jordan recalled the old habits once the wave of contestation died down.

Let's hope for a better outcome for Egypt.

Russia Burning

Opposition Says Putin Law Cripples Russian Fire-Fighting - Reuters, Aug 3, 2010

Here's the Moscow Times article on the claim by Greenpeace Russia and other groups that the 2007 Forest Code is at fault for the summer wildfires (Aug. 3, 2010, in English, written in Russia by a local journalist)

One way a government can maladapt is to pass laws that impede climate change impact management (like fighting wildfires).

Now this wildfire is costing lives and homes, plus emitting CO2 and destroying forests which act as carbon sinks.

See video of the fires here. The article accompanying is about the destruction of a navy air base. Click on the upper left video still to see more video of the fire.

My thoughts go out to the families in Southwestern Russia.