Phoenix broke several heat records last year. Now Grant Park, which has inequitable tree cover, is seeing a tree planting drive that promises some respite from 100F temperatures
It was a relatively cool spring day in Phoenix, Arizona, as a tree planting crew dug large holes in one of the desert city’s hottest and least shaded neighborhoods.
Still, it was sweaty backbreaking work as they carefully positioned, watered and staked a 10-ft tall Blue palo verde and Chilean mesquite in opposite corners of resident Ana Cordoba’s dusty unshaded backyard.
“If I ever retire, I’d like to be able to spend more time outside. The weather is changing, so I am really happy to get these trees. We need more shade,” said Cordoba, 75, a legal secretary, whose family has lived in Grant Park for more than a century.
Over the course of three days in early April, arborists planted 40 or so desert adapted trees in Grant Park, as part of the city’s equity-driven heat mitigation plan to create a shadier, more livable environment amid rising temperatures and hundreds of heat related deaths.
Phoenix is in the middle if the dryest part of North America. All their water gets piped in 400 miles from the Colorado river, which is running dry and unable to sustain the millions of people who rely on it. The only solution is people leaving the area for places actually fit for mass human habitation.
Fair. Scratch it up as a casualty of the climate collapse.