The city’s 2020 Community Tree Priority Map showed canopy covering 22% of land east of I-35, compared with 78% west of the interstate. Closing that gap is a goal of Austin’s Climate Equity Plan, but officials and community groups say planting trees takes time, resources and careful planning.

In March, Austin adopted American Forests’ Tree Equity Score principles and began using a new mapping tool that combines neighborhood data on tree cover and heat with information on income, employment and health. The city is the first municipality in the country to formally adopt the principles.

Urban Forester Emily King said American Forests initially classified Austin as a grassland biome, which would have set a 30% canopy target—a level the city had already reached. City staff pushed for a forest classification and a 50% target, consistent with Austin’s goal of having trees cover half the city by 2050. After listening sessions with city staff, community members and University of Texas partners, American Forests revised the designation.

The mapping tool is intended to guide long-term planning, not dictate where trees are planted, King said. Decisions still depend on whether a site can support trees, whether there is capacity to maintain them, and whether funding and community partners are available. Austin’s next citywide canopy inventory is expected in early 2027; the 2022 inventory put overall canopy coverage at about 41%.

Public investment continues. The city’s Urban Forest Replenishment Fund directed $4.6 million to 24 community forestry projects in fiscal year 2025, with 77% going toward planting and canopy expansion. TreeFolks, which runs the city-contracted NeighborWoods program, has received approval for more than $4.4 million since 2015 and reported planting more than 5,000 NeighborWoods trees in 2023 and 2024. The program offers free trees to Austin residents and Austin Energy customers.

TreeFolks uses the equity data to identify planting areas and assess constraints such as the amount of paved ground compared with plantable space, said communications coordinator Camila Restrepo. Species selection matters, she said, particularly in narrow planting strips surrounded by concrete. The goal is to avoid planting trees unlikely to survive.

At Festival Beach Food Forest, a community project along Waller Street near East Cesar Chavez and I-35, volunteers have spent years building a place for food and medicinal plants while restoring soil. City Council approved expanding the site from about two-thirds of an acre to 3 acres in 2021. Volunteers began the expansion in 2024, planting hundreds of saplings for a berm intended to buffer the site from interstate pollution.

Those saplings were later uprooted to make way for a wastewater pipeline tied to the state’s I-35 expansion. The food forest’s communications coordinator, Angelina Alanis, said the group was not told about the work in advance and that the trees had been planted with city grant funding. Volunteers removed the saplings, and the city helped relocate a 40-year-old mountain laurel.

The pipeline is temporary, but it could take up to a decade before the group can replant the berm after construction ends. The disruption underscores how infrastructure projects can interfere with local efforts to expand shade and restore green space, even when those efforts receive public funding.

Other projects are moving ahead, King said, including the Onion Creek Orchard in Montopolis, a planned food forest near East Slaughter Lane and a new Tree Ambassadors stewardship program. She cautioned that tree growth is slow and difficult to measure year to year, while pointing to city-sponsored projects as evidence of an effort to increase canopy.

For East Austin neighborhoods facing hotter streets and less shade, those initiatives offer potential long-term benefits—but the disparity is the result of decades of uneven canopy, and newly planted trees will take years to mature.