Protecting Bellingham Trees

WMTP Tree Protection

Protecting Bellingham’s Crucially-Needed Mature Trees

Mature Bellingham Trees Are Essential for Climate Resiliency, Livability, Health and Well-Being As The City Grows

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Introduction

Bellingham trees, particularly existing mature trees, provide the most benefits and cost savings to our urban community. Mature Bellingham trees significantly improve climate resiliency to increasingly-common extreme heat and flooding. And mature Bellingham trees provide a wide range of other benefits, such as cleaner air and water, biodiversity/ habitat support, carbon capture, buffers from traffic and noise, and improved quality of life and health.

At the same time, Bellingham needs more infill housing — especially smaller footprint, truly affordable homes. Commercial and institutional projects will inevitably increase, too. Does this inevitable increased density jeopardize the retention of crucially-needed mature Bellingham trees?

With mindful site planning, new infill development can frequently preserve most mature trees on-site to support the City’s tree canopy and climate resiliency goals — and still be economically viable to housing developers.

Most local residents want balance with these issues. They don’t want urban livability to slip away in the name of developer profits. Residents are deeply concerned about climate change and the increased need for climate resiliency. For residents of inner neighborhoods with less tree canopy who are typically most impacted by climate change, it’s also an important environmental equity issue.

WMTP Advocacy — Key Components

To encourage the above balance, WMTP devotes considerable time and resources to independent advocacy and analysis regarding Bellingham trees — with policymakers, agency staff, residents, and stakeholders. Our urban tree advocacy work currently has six components:

1. Bellingham Tree Policy Advocacy

Bellingham’s Landmark Tree Ordinance (enacted in early 2024) and Urban Forest Plan (still in development) are two key policy documents that will help to protect many Bellingham trees.

WMTP has provided detailed critiques of the drafts of both documents and much public testimony to improve the final versions. WMTP will continue to closely monitor future actions and Implementation of these policies as needed, too.

Similarly, WMTP has analyzed early drafting of the Bellingham Comprehensive Plan 10-year update (in progress through 2025). Our goal is to ensure it addresses urban forest and climate resiliency needs via its goals/objectives, zoning, and other guiding elements that will impact Bellingham trees.

WMTP also provided detailed feedback for the Lake Whatcom 5-Year Work Plan update and Bellingham’s Civic Athletic Complex Master Plan.

Note: All of the above WMTP advocacy reports/letters are available on our Useful Resources page.

2. WA State Advocacy

At a Washington state level, when draft bills or codes arise in the Legislature (or come to various state agency Boards) which may positively or negatively impact Bellingham trees and/or mature forests in Whatcom County, WMTP kicks into gear.

WMTP meets with and advises WA State policymakers when needed, sometimes together with our nonprofit partner Restoring Earth Connection located in Olympia. We’ve had a few notable successes and have another terrific one pending. Click here for more details.

3. Aerial Mapping

Bellingham policymakers and the community lack two important pieces of information that can help to inform site-specific and overarching decisions about Bellingham trees.

WMTP has independently created — using the latest (2022) lidar data from the WA Department of Resources, a unique Bellingham’s Tallest Trees map which can be used to identify where protected Landmark Trees are located throughout the city.

We have also created — from USGS/NASA data sets — the first high-resolution Bellingham Extreme Urban Heat Map.

This map identifies where highest temperatures (“heat islands”) occur per Bellingham neighborhood during long, hot summer heat spells that are becoming increasingly frequent and extreme in our new climate era. Such an extreme heat spell during 2021, for example, killed 600+ people in Washington and hospitalized many more.

Our map can be used to identify the most potent locations per neighborhood to plant (and preserve) shade-producing tree canopy to reduce heat island effects.

4. Selective Development Pushbacks

For selected larger proposed developments that have site plans which do not value the retention of mature Bellingham trees (and/or are inaccurate in required compliance with the Green Factor in the City’s Infill Toolkit), WMTP has led community-based efforts to modify these plans. (Past and current pushbacks are described here.) When needed, this includes testifying at a project’s Hearing Examiner session.

5. Community Education

WMTP is building awareness through articles and presentations about nature-integrated design which embeds nature throughout a development (see box below for details.) It goes much further than already-required preservation (or mitigation) of wetlands or critical lands in a development project.

Nature-integrated planning is practiced in many cities worldwide (and by many architects and landscape architects). It’s a way to avoid having parks and trails/Greenways as the only “green refuges” within an otherwise hardscape-dominant (and thus heat and flood prone) urban environment.

6. ‘Green’ Project Rewards

WMTP is working on ways to publicly promote developments — large or small — which consciously and significantly worked to protect Bellingham trees in their project planning process. We hope to highlight projects that will inspire others in the development community to build value, reputation, and profitability in ‘green’ ways that better align with community values.

Volunteer Opportunities

• Want to help our efforts to protect Bellingham trees? Even if you only a have a few hours available per month, please contact us if you have the time and interest!

Related Links/Resources

Bellingham Urban Forest Plan

Bellingham Landmark Tree Ordinance

Bellingham Plan (Comprehensive Plan Update)

WMTP’s Bellingham’s Tallest Trees map

WMTP’s Bellingham Extreme Urban Heat Map

WMTP Advocacy Reports & Presentations