Urban Street Trees for Optimizing Long-term provision of Ecosystem services in Ethiopia

Green infrastructure has proven to be a potent tool for addressing many of the most pressing urban environmental issues often arising when urbanisation is spreading fast, as is currently happening in Africa.

By taking advantage of the ecosystem services provided by nature to deliver specific benefits, sustainability and urban life quality can be improved, and trees are an essential green infrastructure component.

However, long-term vitality is often low for urban trees, due to unfavourable growing conditions and lack of knowledge on suitable species.

This is particularly true in Ethiopia, where a small amount of exotic, ill-adapted species are dominating the urban tree population, despite the large indigenous species diversity.The overall aim of the project is thus to increase the deliverance of needed ecosystem services from urban trees in Ethiopia by increasing the knowledge on suitable native species.

Such focus has the potential to improve sustainability of urban development, sustain native species diversity and increase life quality for urban dwellers.

The objectives are to identify which ecosystem services are mostly needed from the trees, and which indigenous trees that can both deliver the needed ecosystem services and endure the harsh urban growing conditions.

Workshops with stakeholders will be combined with field studies of both relevant species and urban growth conditions, as well controlled experiments on drought tolerance for selected species.