Team BMO supports urban greening in Little Hollywood, San Francisco
Urban green spaces play an important role in the sustainable development of cities. In alignment with BMO’s commitment to sustainability and making meaningful progress by supporting climate change solutions, a team of more than 20 BMO volunteers joined One Tree Planted, Friends of the Urban Forest and local community residents to plant 45 trees in San Francisco’s Little Hollywood Neighborhood.
Planting trees is helping create more green infrastructure in Little Hollywood, a diverse and densely populated residential micro-community with extremely low tree canopy. Ensuring there are adequate trees can improve vegetation planning and resource management, and help address several disparities for the neighbourhood, including buffering the noise of construction and trains and cleaning the air of pollution. The indirect benefits also include building a stronger sense of community and providing critical shade for one of San Francisco’s sunniest microclimates.
Saturday’s planting event was part of a larger San Francisco Bay Area project under BMO’s recent $225,000 grant to One Tree Planted, driving progress in urban planting projects to increase tree canopy in under-resourced communities in California. The Bay Area project is helping to plant fruit and community trees throughout the area, with a focus on replacing dead trees and stumps with new trees. A total of 330 trees will be planted in 2023, with an additional 170 trees planned for 2024. Nearly 30,000 individuals in 13 under-resourced neighborhoods are set to benefit from the project.
This project is part of BMO’s commitment to a sustainable future and our efforts to enable communities to build an environmentally resilient future. Earlier this year, BMO supported One Tree Planted’s reforestation project by planting one tree for each Bank of the West employee that joined BMO after the acquisition, a total of 9,400 trees. In April, BMO’s third annual Trees from Trades program resulted in the planting of 125,000 new trees.
