Four Ways to Future-proof Tree Planting for Climate Resilience
The average lifespan of an urban street tree is around 60 years. During that tree’s lifetime, the climate will have changed substantially from today. A sapling going into the ground this planting season has to survive a climate that’s predicted to be significantly hotter, with droughts featuring more frequently. The Climate Change Adaptation Sub Committee suggest summer temperatures in the South East of the UK will be up to 3.9°C higher by the 2080s under a medium emissions pathway, with summer rainfall reduced by as much as 22% over the same period1.
For landscape architects, engineers and planners, choosing a species based on how it will thrive in today’s climate is no longer enough. The selection must consider how tree species will thrive decades from now, under conditions that are ever-changing.
So, how should we approach futureproof tree planting strategies for climate resilience?
1. Bring medium- and long-term thinking into the design process.
A landscape architect specifying a tree for a masterplan may be working to a five or ten-year project horizon. But most trees will be growing and living for fifty to a hundred years.
The climate that a tree will experience over its lifetime needs to be part of the decision-making process from the outset. According to the Met Office Climate Projections, a summer as hot as 2018 had less than a 10% chance of occurring in the period 1981 to 2000. By the middle of this century, that kind of summer is expected to happen about 50% of the time2. The experience of summer 2026 provides a striking illustration of how quickly these conditions are changing: it was the UK's hottest summer on record3.
Futureproofing in this context means designing for the lifespan of the tree, not the project. Climate projections should inform species selection, and planting schemes should include enough diversity to avoid putting the long-term success of the landscape on a single or few species.
2. Assess species for heat, drought and flood resilience
London's future climate points toward hotter, drier summers and wetter, milder winters. Some regional modelling puts the average London summer around 19% drier by 2050 compared with the 1961 to 1990 baseline, with the driest summers up to 39% drier4.
At the same time, the city's urban heat island effect already pushes London's built-up areas 1.4°C to 2.9°C warmer than the surrounding countryside on average,5 and considerably more during extreme events.
The combination of hotter summers, drier soils and more intense but less frequent rainfall, means species need to be selected for their ability to cope with a combination of stresses they are likely to face over their lifetime: higher temperatures, prolonged drought, depleted soil moisture and periods of more intense rainfall and flooding.
A resilient planting strategy therefore starts by understanding the future conditions of the site, then selecting species with the characteristics needed to cope with them.
3. Build redundancy and diversity into the planting strategy
Ash dieback is expected to kill between 95% and 99% of Britain's ash trees, and ash makes up close to a third of England's tree stock in places. Researchers at the University of Oxford put the total economic cost of the disease to Britain at around £15 billion, driven mostly by the loss of ecosystem services like water and air purification rather than by removal costs alone.
The lesson for planting strategies is that resilience cannot depend on a single species, genus or characteristic.
Cities are already taking this seriously. Minneapolis reduced its reliance on maple from 30% of its public street tree population down to a point where no single genus makes up more than 20%. The intention behind this was to get ahead of the kind of pest and disease shock that hit ash.
Future-proofing a planting strategy means building a diverse portfolio of species so that a single pest, disease or climate stress does not undermine the whole planting scheme. Diversity provides redundancy: if one species struggles as conditions change, others can continue to perform the ecological and landscape functions the scheme was designed to deliver.
4. Test the planning strategy against multiple future climate scenarios
Climate projections contain uncertainty. Assessing species against a range of plausible future scenarios and emissions pathways allows designers to understand where a species is likely to remain suitable, where its performance may become marginal, and where alternative species or a more diverse palette may be needed. This can produce a planting strategy that is much more future-proof.
This is where structured, evidence-led species assessment is vital. Cross-referencing candidate species against projected temperature and moisture index changes through to 2090 gives a much more honest picture of which trees are likely to still be doing their job in fifty years.
Future-proofing therefore needs to happen at three levels: species level (does this tree tolerate the projected 2090 climate predictions for this site?); at portfolio level (does this scheme avoid over concentration in any one species or genus?); and at evidence level (is the selection backed by climate modelling rather than habit?) delivers a really robust outcome.
Kew Reach Palette offers landscape architects, engineers, and environmental consultants a way to check species against future climate suitability, using science developed by the climate resilience research of The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Try it for free here.
References
1. Environment Agency (n.d.) Response to London Assembly call for views on climate change and severe weather: South East summer temperature and rainfall projections. Available at: https://www.london.gov.uk/media/49448/download (Accessed: September 2026).
2. Met Office (n.d.) UK and Global Extreme Events – Heatwaves: UKCP18 projections. Available at: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/understanding-climate/uk-and-global-extreme-events-heatwaves (Accessed: September 2026).
3.Met Office (2026) Summer 2026 provisionally hottest on record for the UK. Available at: [Met Office webpage] (Accessed: 30 September 2026).
4. Basset et al (2021) ‘Climate driven trends in London's urban heat island intensity reconstructed over 70 years using a generalized additive model, Science Direct. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212095521002200 (Accessed: September 2026).
5. University of Oxford (2019) Ash dieback is predicted to cost £15 billion in Britain. Available at: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-05-08-ash-dieback-predicted-cost-%C2%A315-billion-britain (Accessed: September 2026).
6. Pontyondy, PJ. (2025) ‘Minneapolis Street Tree Planting Guidelines to Increase Diversity’, Arboriculture & Urban Forestry. Available at: https://auf.isa-arbor.com/content/early/2025/11/07/jauf.2025.033 (Accessed: September 2026).
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