On an overcast Thursday morning in September, a team of five people slowly makes its way down Broadway Avenue, a residential street in the city of Huntington Park, California. Every couple hundred feet they park their pickup trucks, loaded with 275 gallon water tanks, hop out, and fan out along the street, dousing the roots of young trees lining the strip between the sidewalk and the road.

The watering team, from the nonprofit TreePeople, is responsible for thousands of newly planted trees in seven low-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles County, including Watts, South Gate, and Lynwood; each tree comes with a guarantee that the nonprofit will provide water and other maintenance for at least 3 years.

“Last week we were out in the heat wave and it was brutal,” says Eileen Garcia, senior manager of community forestry with TreePeople. Around her, crew members in wide brim hats and long sleeved shirts haul 5-gallon buckets across lawns fading from green to brown. “We had to start at 5am to avoid the danger.” A few blocks over, Garcia points out a Brisbane box tree, planted by the team three years ago. The leaves look crinkled and crispy at their edges. “That one is struggling,” she says. But most of the young trees planted by TreePeople are doing well – “that’s because we’re here watering them.”

Huntington Park, a three-square-mile, 96-percent Latino city, has a ratio of just 0.7 park acres per 1,000 people; the recommended standard is 2 acres per 1,000. It’s one of the many cities across the country, in partnership with nonprofits and federal and state agencies, trying to increase its urban canopy as global temperatures rise and the risk from excessive heat worsens. Phoenix, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada aim to double their forest canopies within the next decade; San Diego wants to go from 13 percent to 35 percent cover by 2035. Los Angeles has a goal to increase its canopy cover to 50 percent by 2028 in places where historic underinvestment and redlining has left communities of color and low-income communities without shade.

But young trees require a lot of water – posing a challenge for planting programs in the U.S. Southwest, where historic megadrought conditions are drying up rivers and reservoirs.

Read the full article about tree planting by Blanca Begert at Grist.