“Not all native species will survive what’s coming,” he told Dublin city councillors on the climate committee.
Despite the growing emphasis on planting native trees in Dublin, it’s not clear that’s the right strategy as the climate changes, Dublin City Council’s tree officer, Ludovic Beaumont, told councillors.
Not all trees can survive the hostile conditions of a footpath tree pit surrounded by traffic and embedded in concrete, he explained.
And the pressure is growing. “We’re close to drought conditions this year,” he said. “We’ve been out watering trees all over the city.”
But wet years aren’t easy either. “We need trees that can resist both flood and drought,” he said.
“Because we are going to have all these new impacts, we need to have as many species as we can,” he said.
“Not all native species will survive what’s coming,” he said. Some exotic trees might be better choices in some circumstances, he said.
Dublin has 10.2 percent tree canopy cover, which puts it at “medium level” in Europe, Beaumont told councillors at the last meeting of their climate committee, at the end of May.
Of those, about 19 percent are street trees, 23 percent are in parks, 33 percent are in private gardens, and 25 percent are in “other” areas, according to his presentation.
“Those are the trees that you might find in industrial estates, basically,” he said.
He reeled off a long list of the benefits of trees in the city: shade, cooling, reducing air pollution, supporting biodiversity, improving mental health, carbon sequestration, and more.
The city’s current tree strategy ran from 2016 to 2020, and councillors have been pushing council managers for an update.
Green Party Councillor Carolyn Moore asked Beaumont when that would be ready. “There are a lot more targets now, climate targets, biodiversity, carbon,” she said, asking if the new strategy would reflect that.
The new strategy is in the works, he said, and the changes will mostly be in the action plan, not the overall goals, Beaumont said.
Right now, existing goals require planting more trees – ones that will be durable, maintainable, and stay healthy over time.
A core philosophy of the city’s approach is summed up in a mantra that Beaumont repeated: “the right tree, in the right place, for the right reason.”
Beaumont said a newly planted tree takes 20 to 40 years to become carbon neutral. If it dies before then, which many do, “we’ve actually made the situation worse” – in terms of carbon.
Beaumont said, as the environment changes, so do their calculations about tree planting.
“We’re not just planting trees,” he said. “We’re trying to build resilience. To floods, to droughts, to heat. But it’s difficult in a city.”
Council park staff plant around 3,000 to 4,000 trees and shrubs a year, Beaumont said. But street planting remains tricky, especially in parts of the city with narrow footpaths, underground pipes and wires, or little soil volume.
The council has been working on an inventory of its trees since 2021. So far, it has looked at about 25 percent – or 25,000 – of the city’s street and park trees.
Among that group of trees, about 75 percent were in fair condition, and about another 15 percent in good condition, his presentation showed.
The remaining roughly 10 percent were in poor condition, or were dead, it says.
“We do need more species variety,” said Beaumont. Dublin currently has over 300 tree species, though many are concentrated in parks like St Anne’s.
He referenced the “10/20/30 rule,”-- a guideline for urban forests facing climate pressure: no more than 10% of any one species, 20% of any one genus, or 30% of any one family.
Moore, the Green Party councillor, asked about community-led “pocket forests”, where dense planting mimics wild growth and rapid canopy growth, which the Department of the Environment promoted in the past.
Beaumont was sceptical. “They grow fast, but they’re fragile. You put the trees in too close, and they’re in competition. It’s not a real forest,” he said. “It’s quick and Instagram-friendly. But if it worked, we would have adopted it a long time ago.”
Still, he said, pocket forests can have an educational value, especially for kids.
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
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