What’s Happening to the Trees in New Orleans?

To a casual visitor, New Orleans appears to be a city of trees. It’s home to both the largest urban wildlife refuge in the US and a city park larger than New York’s Central Park. Sprawling live oaks, some hundreds of years old, shade the city’s most famous avenues and neighborhoods; their enormous boughs, dripping with Spanish moss, are local icons.

But that picturesque image is a bit misleading.

“Look at basically any other street, and you don’t have any trees,” says Susannah Burley, the director of Sustaining Our Urban Landscape (SOUL), an urban reforestation nonprofit in New Orleans. A new survey, published by SOUL as part of a plan for replanting the city, finds that less than 19% of New Orleans is shaded by tree canopy.

“Anybody who works with trees knows that trees are barometers of health and wealth,” says Burley. “This just proves what I think we’ve all known anecdotally for a long time.”

The tree survey found that New Orleans is less leafy than several Southern cities of greater population density, such as Miami, Atlanta and Memphis. That gap, according to SOUL’s findings, reflects both New Orleans’ environmental vulnerabilities and the city’s failures in planning and maintaining a healthy urban forest.

In part, the deforestation of New Orleans is a lingering legacy of Hurricane Katrina. Before the 2005 storm, which flooded some neighborhoods 10 feet deep in saltwater, trees shaded about 30% of city.