CONFERENCE SPEAKERS

Aotearoa New Zealand is globally heralded for its clean, green, iconic land- and city-scapes, but it faces its own challenges in establishing and maintaining effective urban forests. The inaugural Urban Forest Futures New Zealand symposium aimed to understand these challenges by bringing together 110 researchers, arborists, council workers, indigenous peoples, and urban planners for two days in April 2024. All sharing a common-goal, these stakeholders aim to improve our urban forest initiatives, but face hurdles when integrating across disciplines and being stone-walled by existing policy, or the absence of effective policies. Here we aimed to understand the 1) priorities, 2) challenges, and 3) suggestions for improving urban forests in the future from each stakeholder group. We find that even though the top ranked priorities or each group may differ, there is a broad consensus between stakeholders in their priorities and also in the challenges they face. Some of the main challenges that slow or stop progress for multiple stakeholder groups include: a lack of funding, lack of political will, lack of understanding of the benefits of trees, and missing key information. We synthesise the learnings from these stakeholders and propose an avenue to improve urban forests for everyone, and for the betterment of New Zealand. This proposed framework suggests collecting new information, developing efficient (not bureaucratic) policies to support tree establishment and maintenance, engaging with professional arborists and urban foresters from the very beginning, and developing resources to share information across stakeholders and the general public.