Bloco wants 30% tree cover in every neighbourhood by 2035, and nobody living further than 300 metres from a park
Portugal's Bloco de Esquerda has filed a bill requiring urban neighbourhoods to reach 30% tree canopy by 2035 and guaranteeing a quality green space within 300 metres of every home.
The idea fits in one sentence: nobody should live more than 300 metres from a decent tree. On Tuesday, Bloco de Esquerda filed a bill in parliament trying to turn that into law.
What is Bloco proposing on urban trees?
Two targets, both for 2035. First: no consolidated residential area may have less than 30% of its surface under tree canopy. Second: nobody should live more than 300 metres from a quality green space.
Where hitting 30% is physically impossible — and in plenty of historic centres it is — councils would have to compensate with green roofs and facades, ripping up paving, green corridors or shade structures. There is no “we have no room” exemption, only an obligation to find another answer.
The party also wants at least half the programme’s annual funding aimed at “priority urban areas”: the neighbourhoods that combine the worst heat-island effect, the fewest trees, the least access to green space and the highest social vulnerability. That is the most interesting part of the proposal, and probably the most contested, because it says out loud that shade in Portugal is unevenly handed out.
Why is this coming up now?
Because it is July and it is hot. The bill lands in the same week twelve environmental organisations wrote to the government asking for a commitment on extreme-heat adaptation, with six measures on the table including a national network of climate refuges.
And because shade has stopped being a decorative nicety. A street with trees runs measurably cooler than the same street without them, and in a heatwave that gap lands hardest on the people already most at risk. This is not abstract: June’s heatwave killed 10,650 more people than usual across Europe, and most of those deaths happened in cities. That is the case the bill rests on, and it is a public health argument rather than a gardening one.
As an opposition bill, the road to passage is long and probably bumpy. The text and its progress can be tracked on parliament’s website.
In the meantime, anyone who has been in Lisbon this past week already knows which side of the street they pick. It is the one with the trees.
Image: Vitor Oliveira from Torres Vedras, PORTUGAL / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
