Adam Cormack, Woodland Trust (UK)

"We could do with a few more trees" - bringing data, people and trees together in Newark, Nottinghamshire

Adam will present a case study of a pilot project in Newark, Nottinghamshire where a partnership of the Woodland Trust, Reach Learning Disability, Newark & Sherwood District Council and Greenwood Community Forest are targeting work in a low tree canopy community. The project is part of the Trust's wider Trees For All programme. The talk will cover how the project has combined data from the Tree Equity Score UK with community engagement and a partnership with a local charity that work with adults with learning disabilities. The project focusses on Hawtonville - neighbourhood in Newark where tree canopy cover is as low as 5-6% in places. This talk will cover how the partnership has identified planting locations around the community and is working to engage local residents with tree care and establishment.

Biography

Adam is Director of Supporter Mobilisation at the Woodland Trust where he has been leading the Trust's work on urban trees, community engagement and tree equity. He has worked in conservation for 20+ years in a range of roles and before that worked as a musician (and many other things). He is fascinated by the relationship between people and nature particularly in towns and cities and the way that our urban treescape reflects who we are.

Arjen Buijs, Wageningen University (Netherlands)

How can community engagement in urban greening strengthen equity and justice in cities?

Greening the country and greening cities isn't just about planting trees—it's about who benefits and who decides. In this presentation, I will explore the question how greening cities through nature-based solutions can serve all communities equitably, particularly those historically left out of planning decisions.

I will explore opportunities and challenges of a “Mosaic Governance" approach, a collaborative effort to bring together local governments, community members, and grassroots groups and explore six potential pathways through which this governance model advances environmental justice.

Mosaic Governance may contribute to better inclusion of stakeholders and marginalised groups, as well as the recognition of their preferences and uses of urban green—ensuring projects reflect and respect the values, cultural practices, and aspirations of diverse communities rather than imposing standardized solutions. For practitioners, the approach provides an evidence-based framework for moving from top-down programs to genuine partnerships that give communities a say in decision making. The six pathways offer concrete strategies for ensuring our urban forest work doesn't inadvertently fuel green gentrification or deepen existing inequities.

This research pushes us to expand our professional lens beyond ecological outcomes to embrace social, cultural, economic, and political equity. I will argue for the need to understand the concept of justice broadly, recognizing that fair access to green space connects to wider patterns of inequality in our cities and offers opportunities to increase equity and inclusiveness beyond the environmental realm.

How we govern urban greening matters as much as what we plant. Fostering authentic collaboration and recognizing diverse community needs can make urban forestry a tool for advancing both environmental and social justice.

Biography

Arjen is an Associate Professor in forest and nature conservation policy at Wageningen University, Netherlands. He is interested in human-nature relationships, community engagements, relationships between communities and governments, and environmental justice across Europe.

Ayanda Roji, Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo and Centre on African Public Spaces (South Africa)

Beyond tree equity: Green spaces as sites of social integration

Urban greening is never neutral. It is political. In South Africa, trees and parks were weaponised as tools of exclusion under colonialism and apartheid, deliberately shaping who belonged where. Across our cities, the urban landscape still bears these scars. The presence or absence of trees is not accidental. It reflects a history of strategic planning that privileged some whilst dispossessing others. Green suburbs for the few, barren townships for the many.

Today, urban forests can help undo that spatial injustice. But only if we are honest about what we are confronting. This is not a technical challenge. It is a political one.

Quantitative tools have been valuable for mapping uneven access to urban nature. But they risk reducing justice to a formula. Hectares per capita. Canopy cover percentages. Distance to parks. These metrics make inequality visible, but they also make it manageable, contained, depoliticised. They tell us how much exists and where it is distributed. They cannot tell us who belongs, who feels safe, or who has power to shape these spaces.

A city can claim impressive green coverage whilst entire neighbourhoods experience nature as distant, inaccessible, unsafe, or culturally irrelevant. Coverage metrics alone cannot dismantle exclusion. They can only measure it.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, when access to green spaces became essential for survival and sanity, Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo ran a survey exploring how residents experienced these spaces. We found three distinct motivations. Low-income neighbourhoods primarily sought basic public infrastructure. Seating, shade trees, toilets, water. Others sought respite. Calm, beauty, solitude, escape from stress, connection with nature. Still others sought social and active experiences. Exercise, walking the dog, taking children out, meeting friends and family, having a picnic. Across all groups, the need for safety was universal.

Managing green spaces has taught us that inequality manifests not just in distribution, but in the collision of diverse uses and needs within shared space. For too long, urban green spaces have been designed for comfort, leisure, and aesthetic pleasure. The priorities of those with economic and spatial privilege. Low-income communities, meanwhile, have been left with vacant lots, polluted buffers, and parks without toilets or water.

Cultivating belonging requires intentional stewardship that acknowledges and accommodates this diversity, even when uses clash. Recentring green infrastructure around equity means asking certain questions. Whose daily survival depends on this space? Who has been excluded? And how do we redistribute not just trees, but power over their planning, design, and governance?

This work is not automatic. It demands participatory methods that bring everyone to the table. Not as beneficiaries, but as co-creators and decision-makers. It requires conscientisation about the publicness of these spaces. That they belong to all, not one group. It needs the integration of different knowledge systems and practices, recognising that Western planning models alone cannot serve African cities.

Urban forests are not just about biodiversity and shade. They are about belonging. They are about justice. Trees are not just carbon sinks. They are symbols of who is valued, who is protected, who is seen. Who gets shade? Who plays safely in parks? Who gathers, protests, or rests in green spaces? These are social questions, fundamental to the work of reconnecting fragmented cities and fractured communities.

Access and use are not given. They must be deliberately created. A city can have high forest cover whilst residents still struggle to reach it, feel welcome in it, or find what they need within it. Social integration deepens when communities, not just one group, not just governments, are empowered as co-creators and stewards of urban nature.

True green equity moves beyond tree distribution to centre participation, safety, belonging, and the redistribution of power over urban nature.

Biography

Ayanda is the Convener of the Centre on African Public Spaces (CAPS), a continental knowledge exchange platform dedicated to public and green spaces, developed as a partnership between the City of Johannesburg, UN-Habitat, and GIZ. As Head of Environmental Education and Research at Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo, she works to promote awareness, behaviour change, and shared stewardship of urban green spaces.

In March 2025, Ayanda coordinated the 2nd African Forum on Urban Forests on behalf of the City of Johannesburg in partnership with FAO and UN-Habitat, bringing together over 400 delegates from 35+ African countries. This resulted in the adoption of Johannesburg Declaration and the launch of the Afrika Mazingira Collective, a network that connects urban stakeholders across Africa to promote the implementation, and scaling up of nature-based solutions for city urban resilience, biodiversity, and liveability. In May 2025, she received an award from the European Forum on Urban Forestry (EFUF) for promoting regional cooperation on urban forests between Africa and Europe.

Ayanda holds a master's degree from the International Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands, where she specialised in Local and Regional Development. She is passionate about connecting African indigenous knowledge systems with contemporary urban planning practices and learning from city practitioners globally to advance spatial justice and equitable access to green spaces.

Cecil Konijnendijk, Nature Based Solutions Institute (Netherlands)

The potential of the 3+30+300 principle for promoting green equity and biocultural diversity

The 3+30+300 principle is an evidence-based guideline that promotes the visibility, proximity, and access of urban trees and urban green spaces. It calls for all of us to be able to see at least 3 mature trees from our homes, schools, workplaces, or places of care. It also sets a recommended minimum tree canopy cover of 30% at the neighbourhood level. Finally, it also states that we should all have a high-quality, publicly accessible urban green space within a 300-metre walk from where we live.

The principle, launched in February 2021 by the author, is based in some of the latest evidence on especially the public health and climate benefits of trees and green spaces. It has a strong focus on (distributional) environmental equity, calling for all people to have good visible and physical access to trees and green.

This talk discusses the role the 3+30+300 principle can play in promoting green equity, by careful implementation in different contexts, by recognising green equity's multiple dimensions and by linking it with the biocultural diversity concept. The latter sees urban forests as co-created by humans and other parts of nature, recognising the need to connect cultural with biodiversity aspects. Experiences from implementation of the 3+30+300 principle to date are analysed and some of the associated opportunities and challenges are highlighted.

Biography

Cecil Konijnendijk co-directs the Nature Based Solutions Institute, a think tank for the evidence-based greening of cities and communities. He is also an honorary professor of urban forestry at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Cecil has done research and advised governments and organisations in more than 30 countries. In February 2021 he proposed the 3+30+300 principle for greener and healthier communities.

Jessica Quinton, Arizona State University (USA)

Plumbing and poetry: Aligning housing and urban green space agendas, applying ethics of care

Ensuring the provision of abundant, accessible urban green space requires aligning urban greening goals with other priorities. This demands both "plumbing" (essential, functional systems, processes, and logistics) and "poetry" (vision, inspiration, values, and meaning). This talk first examines urban green equity from a “plumbing” perspective of aligning housing and greening to avoid issues like green gentrification. It will then explore some “poetry:” applying ethics of care to urban green space management.

Local governments face fiscal constraints, leading to “commonsense” approaches to urbanisation: densify housing, require developers to “pay their fair share,” and increase property values to bolster tax revenue. Such strategies often generate uneven development and threaten greenspace. Ensuring residents have affordable housing and abundant, accessible greenspace requires holistic planning that recognises the interdependence of these systems: what I term the “housing-greenspace nexus.”

I reviewed existing literature and found six housing factors (policy, location, tenure, costs, form, and development) that influence, and are influenced by, greenspace. These relationships are complex, non-linear, context-dependent, and sometimes contradictory. Canadian and American urban greening plans reflect these tensions. For example, many portrayed rising property values as beneficial, but recent plans expressed concerns about gentrification. Despite this, many plans use housing development to fund/accommodate greenspace, entrenching this very green-gentrification dynamic.

We need to implement/evaluate housing affordability measures alongside greening; fund greening independent of development; develop/evaluate innovative strategies to green densifying areas; and sustain collaborations with housing, land-use, and/or social services departments/organisations.

For a shot of poetry, I end by asking: what if we applied ethics of care to urban green spaces? Caring is defined as “…everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible.” How can we apply care (including attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, and solidarity) to urban green space management?

Biography

Jessica Quinton is an Assistant Professor of Parks and Recreation at Arizona State University’s School of Community Resources and Development. She holds a PhD in Forestry from the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on theoretical and applied contributions related to environmental justice, governance, and public perception of urban forests and green spaces. This has included topics such as green gentrification, cemeteries as urban forests, and more recently, ethics of care and young adults.

Jon Moses, Right to Roam (UK)

Old oaks and ancient rights: A perspective on trees, public access and arboreal justice from the Right to Roam campaign

Around 35% of the ancient trees listed on the Ancient Tree Inventory are inaccessible to the public. With many of these trees providing the 'taproot' for the stories, myths and heritage of our landscapes, what are the implications of their remaining out of reach of the public? Jon Moses from the Right to Roam talks us through arboreal trespass and the campaign to unlock public access across England and Wales.

Biography

Jon Moses is the co-director of the Right to Roam campaign and co-editor of “WILD SERVICE: Why Nature Needs You”. He holds a PhD in historical geography and has published essays, features, profiles and reviews for publications including the Guardian, Businessweek and The Lead.

Kenton Rogers, Treeconomics (UK)

From metrics to meaning: Delivering green equity through community-led urban forestry

Green and tree equity are is often framed through data: canopy cover, access metrics, and indices such as the Tree Equity Score. While these tools are valuable for highlighting spatial inequalities, they can only tell part of the story. This presentation focuses on what equity looks like on the ground, through community engagement undertaken as part of the Belfast and Birmingham Tree and Woodland Strategies.

In most cities, equity cannot be understood without acknowledging history, identity, and place. The city is richly diverse, yet diversity does not necessarily equate to integration. Communities may live side by side while remaining socially and culturally disconnected, shaped by legacy issues of division, trust, and representation. In this context, trees and green spaces can either reinforce existing inequalities or act as shared civic infrastructure that helps bridge them.

Drawing on practical engagement with communities across Belfast and Birmingham, this talk explores how inclusive processes — not just equitable outcomes — are critical to delivering meaningful green equity. It reflects on how listening, co-design, and locally rooted conversations revealed very different perceptions of trees: as symbols of pride, neglect, safety, memory, or exclusion, depending on context. These insights challenge assumptions that increasing canopy cover alone will deliver equitable benefits.

The presentation makes connections between tree equity, wider green equity agendas, and social inclusion, arguing that trees can provide neutral, non-threatening spaces through which relationships between people, place, and institutions can begin to change. Projects centred on trees can create opportunities for dialogue, shared stewardship, and long-term trust — particularly in cities where integration cannot be taken for granted.

This case-study-led contribution suggests that achieving green equity and sustainable tree-scapes requires moving beyond metrics towards approaches that recognise trees as social as well as environmental assets, embedded in the lived realities of diverse urban communities.

Biography

Kenton Rogers is both a Chartered Urban Forester and Chartered Environmentalist with a master's degree in Forest Ecosystem Management. During his 25-year career he has worked on a wide range of commercial, urban and community forestry projects in the UK, Europe and North Africa. Kenton was a Trustee of the International Tree Foundation for 10 years, and is also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Kenton is also Co-Founder of Treeconomics, an employee-owned social enterprise headquartered in Exeter, which specialises in urban forest assessment, valuation and management across the UK and Europe.

Kenton has written many popular articles and scientific papers on the role and benefits of trees and urban forests in creating better places to live and work. He was also a contributing author on the Urban section of UK National Ecosystem Assessment and the Springer Handbook on ‘The Urban Forest’. Most recently he co-authored the Arboricultural Association’s Tree Care Manual.

Lorien Nesbitt, University of British Columbia (Canada)

Co-creating just, green cities: Beyond metrics, towards community empowerment

In this presentation, I explore how cities might move beyond narrow, metrics-driven approaches to urban green equity toward more just, inclusive, and context-sensitive pathways for urban greening and climate adaptation. While quantitative tools and indicators have been important for identifying uneven access to urban nature, they often fail to capture the lived experiences, values, and relationships that shape how people interact with green spaces in everyday life.

Drawing on interdisciplinary research at the intersection of urban forestry, environmental justice, and climate resilience, I reflect on the limitations of technocratic, top-down approaches to urban sustainability. I examine how well-intentioned greening initiatives can become entangled with broader social, political, and economic dynamics, sometimes reinforcing existing inequalities or producing unintended consequences.

I argue for the importance of recognitional justice in urban greening and planning—centring plural values of nature, diverse forms of stewardship, and the knowledge embedded in local practices of care. Examples from participatory action research conducted with communities in both the Global North and Global South illustrate how engaging lived experience can deepen understandings of vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation, while opening new possibilities for more responsive and equitable interventions.

Ultimately, I call for the co-creation of social and institutional infrastructures that support networks of care for green, healthy cities. By fostering collaboration across communities, governments, and disciplines, the presentation outlines pathways toward urban greening and climate adaptation efforts that are not only environmentally effective, but socially just and transformative.

Biography

Lorien is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of urban forestry, environmental justice, and climate resilience. Her research focuses on co-creating more liveable, equitable, and sustainable cities through participatory, justice-oriented approaches grounded in urban social-ecological systems. She examines recognitional justice, green gentrification, civic stewardship, and the role of urban nature in human health and well-being, with attention to power and inequality.

Lorien leads the Urban Natures Lab at the University of British Columbia, partnering with communities, governments, and scholars to advance just and transformative urban futures.

Lotte Dijkstra, Newcastle University (UK)

Radical community engagement: Storytelling as method to enable recognitional access to urban green space

The urban forest is nature close to home for many city dwellers. Yet, engagement with and access to the urban forest is unequal. Quantitative research indicates that human age, ethnicity, health, and socioeconomic deprivation exacerbate this unequal access. Further research suggests that equitable access can only be achieved when three specific dimensions of access are addressed: the equitable distribution of benefits and burdens, of procedural access through meaningful engagement in decision-making, and of the recognition of lived experiences. Community and stakeholder engagement is key to ensuring such inclusion, especially procedural and recognitional access. Such community engagement needs to be radical: connected to place, accessible to all, including historically marginalised voices, and allowing communities to foster a sense of ownership and attachment to the landscapes we are inviting them to. Recognitional access starts with fostering a sense of belonging.

Radical community engagement can be facilitated through storytelling. In this interactive and collaborative workshop, we will together explore the ground of the Stonehouse Court Hotel. The methodology, developed throughout Dijkstra’s PhD Research, includes prompts and principles of more-than-human storytelling, storylistening, storycrafting, and storysharing. Together, participants will notice, engage, associate and respond to the stories embedded in place, practising this mode of radical community engagement to enable a sense of belonging, facilitating recognitional access to urban green space.

Biography

Lotte Dijkstra is a landscape architect, researcher, storyteller and artist. Her interdisciplinary work explores intersectional environmentalism, radical community engagement and place-based creative methods in landscape architecture and urban forestry. Through research and teaching at Newcastle University and her company Studio PLACES, she facilitates and delivers community engagement between cities and their more-than-human citizens. She writes and edits stories on landscape, architecture and the built environment for academia, practice and the public, and completes her PhD by Creative Practice entitled Urban Forest Stories at Newcastle University in March 2026.

Luke Barley, National Trust (UK)

Deciding the future of the National Trust's oldest tree

The Ankerwycke yew is the most ancient tree in the National Trust's care at around two-thousand years old. In 2021 a disagreement emerged around its management following observations of movement in its trunk. Some stakeholders advocated loudly for an intensive bracing system to be installed, while others - equally vocal - felt the tree should be left to develop naturally. The local Trust team felt caught in the middle, unable to figure out the best way forward for the tree and doomed to alienate one group or another. Representatives from the different groups, along with other key stakeholders, were invited to a facilitated, participative workshop where everyone's viewpoint was heard and different options explored. After listening to one another's perspectives, the group arrived at a consensus view around the immediate future management of the tree.

Biography

Luke Barley is a senior adviser on trees and woodland for the National Trust, providing leadership, guidance and support across the charity's 250,000-hectare landholding. He has particular interests in ancient woodland and ancient trees, and is also closely involved with the Trust's ambition to establish 20 million new trees by 2030 and the organisation's system of Tree Safety Management.

Margarita Triguero-Mas, Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability, Barcelona Institute for Global Health (Spain)

Just, green, healthy cities: Beyond population health outcomes

Cities around the world are engaging in greening interventions to – among others – improve population health. A significant body of research suggests that socially underprivileged residents may experience greater health benefits from exposure to natural outdoor settings compared to privileged groups. However, the existing scarce research on the interlinks between environmental gentrification and health indicates that environmental gentrification negatively impacts underprivileged residents.

Growing research highlights that cities that are engaging in greening interventions continue to face socio-environmental injustices that hinder socially underprivileged residents’ lives. Indeed, research indicates that greening interventions planning inadequately acknowledges the profound injustices embedded in most past and ongoing development processes. That is, planning is usually tailored to the preferences and needs of groups in power (typically middle-class white men holding full-time jobs) and (re-)produce segregation, exclusion, and inequity. Cities rarely consider injustices beyond uneven geographical distribution of greening interventions. However, those in varying positions of power may hold distinct perceptions, values, needs, experiences and risks associated to re-naturalising interventions. How these differences are included and valued as rich knowledge in planning decisions may have relevant implications in the health of marginalised populations.

In summary, there is a growing imperative for planners and policymakers to adopt novel frameworks that address the enduring socio-environmental injustices that cities implementing re-naturalizing interventions to move towards just green health cities.

Biography

Margarita holds a degree in Environmental Sciences (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), master’s degree in Public Health and doctoral degree in Biomedicine (Pompeu Fabra University). She is a Ramon y Cajal senior researcher at the Faculty of Health Sciences and member of teaching staff on the master’s degree in Planetary Health (UOC), an associate researcher at the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ, ICTA-UAB) and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal).

Roddy Shaw, Trees for Cities (UK)

What does securing green equity mean for Hartlepool?

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Biography

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Saira Ali, Landscape Institute and Bradford Council (UK)

Nature for All: Reimagining cities through green equity

Drawing on practice-based examples from Bradford, one of the UK’s most diverse and youthful cities, Saira Ali FLI team Leader Landscape Design and Conservation at Bradford Council and President Elect Landscape Institute will demonstrate how landscape-led approaches, integrating public realm design, blue-green infrastructure, community co-design and child-focused interventions, can improve health, wellbeing and climate resilience in underserved neighbourhoods. The talk will also reflect on the Landscape Institute’s role in championing green equity and strengthening collaboration between landscape, arboriculture and urban forestry to create fairer, healthier places for all.

Biography

Saira Ali FLI is an award-winning Landscape Architect and President Elect of the Landscape Institute, leading Landscape Design & Conservation at Bradford Council. She champions landscape-led regeneration that tackles health inequality, climate resilience and green equity in one of the UK’s most diverse and youthful cities. Her work has received national and international recognition, including Excellence in Place Regeneration at the Landscape Institute Awards 2025, Infrastructure Project of the Year at the National Construction Excellence Awards 2025 and honours from the International Healthy City Design Congress. Saira also serves on the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority and contributes to national advisory and professional panels.

Tony Kirkham (UK)

Biography

After studying at The Royal Botanic Gardens Kew on the 3-year diploma course, he was the Head of the Arboretum, Gardens and Horticultural Services, responsible for the management and curation of over 14,000 trees and curated and managed the hardy shrub collections in the collections until July 2021 when he retired after 43 years’ service for which he received an MBE and the RHS VMH.

He is an author of many popular and technical books and papers on trees and lectures in the UK and overseas on the subject, making regular television and radio appearances including more recently “The Secret Life of Trees” on Channel 5.

He is Vice President of the Arboricultural Association, Patron of the Trees and Design Action Group (TDAG), sits on the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Council, and the Woody Plant Expert Group, a trustee of the Tree Register of the British Isles and the International Dendrology Society, chairing Trees and Shrubs Online.