Urban Forest Management Plan

The District is developing an Urban Forest Management Plan to protect, enhance, and maintain the health of West Vancouver's urban forest over the next 15 years.

View the draft Urban Forest Management Plan (PDF)

View larger mapWest Vancouver’s urban forest includes all trees, vegetation, and soil found within parks, along streets, in surrounding forests, and on private property. The urban forest is an asset that provides many important benefits for the health and livability of our community, but it continues to be impacted by climate change and development activities.

Why we need an Urban Forest Management Plan

The Urban Forest Management Plan ties together years of studies, reports, and community feedback into a cohesive plan with specific goals and strategies to support the District’s guiding policies related to urban forest management in order to maintain the health and maximize the benefits of our urban forest over the long term.

The draft plan includes five goals with a total of 58 associated strategies that aim to address the following challenges:

• Competing uses - Urban forest goals must be balanced with other objectives in West Vancouver. Protecting and growing tree canopy will continue to require careful planning and trade-offs (development on private property and transportation routes and infrastructure on public lands).
• Inequitable distribution - There is a 49% gap between West Vancouver’s neighbourhood with the highest canopy cover, Sunset Beach (68%), and its lowest canopy cover neighbourhood, in Ambleside 1 (19%). Growing canopy cover in those neighbourhoods will be important to distribute urban forest benefits more equitably.
• Views - Views and trees both provide benefits to many property owners and visitors that sometimes can overlap and be perceived as detrimental to one another.
• Climate change - Climate change has already started impacting ecosystems and communities worldwide. The urban forest is a critical natural asset to help the District in its climate change mitigation (e.g., carbon storage, rainwater management, air quality) and adaptation (e.g., shading and cooling) initiatives because of its many environmental benefits. Trees also pose a risk to the community due to impacts on the urban forest from wildfires, storm and wind events, drought, and pests, which can result in hazardous and dead trees that need to be managed.
• Increased demand for municipal urban forest management - In recent years, the municipality has processed a growing number of tree permits and work orders for tree issues on public land.
• Lack of data on assets in highest-use areas - Acquiring an inventory of its urban tree assets’ number, diversity, and condition would help West Vancouver plan for, budget, and maintain its urban trees more proactively over the coming years.
• Infrastructure conflicts - Trees pose significant issues in terms of the maintenance of District infrastructure (road, culvert, watercourse blockages, tree root damage to pipes, buildings, pavements, power lines), which impact service levels, require immediate response during storm events, and pose challenges for planting trees.

View the Draft Urban Forest Management Plan (PDF) for more details.

Thank you for your feedback

The draft Urban Forest Management Plan was developed based on community feedback received during the first phase of engagement in 2022.

The survey closed on Monday, May 29 at 4 p.m.

We thank everyone that took the time to complete the survey.

Staff will further refine the draft plan based on feedback received before it proceeds to Council consideration.

Virtual information meeting

A virtual information meeting took place on Tuesday, May 16 at 12 p.m. Thank you to everyone that attended.

How did we get here?

Community engagement (PDF) held in 2022 helped develop the draft Urban Forest Management Plan.

The 2022 State of the Urban Forest Report and LiDAR Tree Canopy Study (PDF) provide a broad overview of the urban forest, the challenges with respect to climate change, and a summary of the District’s current operations for tree management.

The Tree Bylaw regulates the cutting and removal of protected trees on private land. For further information, view the Tree Bylaw background information (PDF).

View a complete summary of urban forest management policies (PDF)