The World Economic Forum has released a list of cities with the most trees, Durban and Johannesburg made the top 10 and we are overjoyed!
There’s a global movement to encourage cities to grow more trees and plan more parks. This year’s International Day of Forests, cities across the globe were encouraged to invest in green spaces.
To get a clearer picture of which cities have the most tree coverage today, MIT’s Senseable Lab partnered with the World Economic Forum (WEF) to create Treepedia. Treepedia is a site with interactive maps that show the density of greenery in major cities around the world.
The website was developed using information from Google Street View to determine what they called the “Green View Index,” a rating that quantifies each city’s percentage of canopy coverage based on aerial images. The website was launched in 2016 and only had 10 listed cities at the time. It has since gone on to add additional cities each year.
The World Economic Forum recently released a list of the 19 cities with the most trees. South Africa was featured twice, both within the top 10.
Johannesburg came in 8th with 23.6% and Durban came in 7th with 23.7%. Cape Town is also on the Treepedia database (currently no other South African cities are featured) and has a rating of 13.4%.
According to reports, when society feels good, forests get bigger. With South Africa having two top 10 cities on the list, that means great things for the residents surrounded by the trees.
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