Kitchener’s approach to growing our urban forest is recognized with a Smart 20 Award

The City of Kitchener has been recognized for efforts to strategically grow its tree canopy with a Smart 20 Award from Smart Cities Connect. Announced at yesterday’s City Council meeting, this award recognizes the top 20 most innovative and influential projects each year from an international pool of applicants. This year, Kitchener was one of only two Canadian municipalities honoured with this award, along with projects from the United States, Italy and Taiwan.

Kitchener received the Smart 20 award for Cooling Our City – An Equitable Guide to Tree Planting, an innovative tool developed by Kitchener’s Geospatial Data and Analytics team and used by its Forestry team to help prioritize tree planting in underserved areas. It is used as part of the broader Sustainable Urban Forest Strategy, which focuses on sustainable urban forest management and tree canopy coverage growth to 30 per cent in each ward by 2050 and 33 per cent city-wide by 2070.

Cooling Our City uses census data, satellite imagery and municipal tree data to help identify neighbourhoods with the lowest tree canopy coverage. Using data and spatial models, each neighbourhood is assigned a tree equity score. Based on the tree equity score, neighbourhoods with low canopy coverage are then selected for focused tree planting activities, introducing the many benefits trees can provide to help communities thrive and reducing heat islands across the city. This not only provides underserved neighbourhoods with better access to the benefits of trees, but helps direct planting efforts, use resources efficiently, and plant trees where they make the biggest impact as part of an affordable and scalable program.

The information gathered using the Cooling Our City tool helps the City implement its Community Canopy program to directly address inequal canopy coverage across Kitchener. Piloted in 2024 and launched as an annual program in 2025, Community Canopy focused on planting new trees in neighbourhoods that need them the most. Using data from Cooling Our City the program targets areas with tree equity scores lower than 75 and aims to plant 150 large trees in those areas each year.

Tools like Cooling Our City ensure the City makes strategic, informed and impactful decisions for our community. We are honoured to be recognized for these efforts as we move toward a greener future.

Visit Cooling Our City – An Equitable Guide to Tree Planting to learn more about how the City develops tree equity scores and planting strategies. More information on how this tool is used to inform planting in underserved neighbourhoods is available at Kitchener.ca/CommunityCanopy.