‘No other city in the world is as green!’
This bold claim is made by the official travel guide of the City of Vienna.
The accolade is based on a North American consultancy group’s ranking of the 50 most-visited cities according to criteria such as parks, public transport and recycling.
There is certainly no need to own a car in Vienna. Trams carry you smoothly around town, there are five underground lines, and buses take you as far as the vineyards in the hills on the edge of the city. There may be occasional delays but the Wiener Linien rarely – if ever – strike.
If you live in Vienna, you will also be familiar with the MA48: the municipal department responsible for waste collection. Their trucks are bright orange and their small street bins amuse passers-by with shockingly bad puns like ‘Hasta la Mista, Baby’ (Mist is the Austrian word for rubbish). Recycling is comprehensive, including paper, plastics, glass and organic matter. Residual waste is turned into energy at the Spittelau incinerator, an architectural icon.
Yet living here, I often miss trees. Yes, there are parks and palace gardens dotted around the city – such as Prater, which is undoubtedly delightful if you live in the 2nd district – but on my commute there are still too many streets with not a single tree in sight.
And in the summer, I feel the heat.
If you look at a map of Vienna, you will see green areas on the outskirts of the city. Most notably, the Donau-Auen National Park in the south-east stretches downriver, and the Vienna Woods Biosphere Reserve climbs up into the hills in the west. Officially, these areas belong to the city – and they are, genuinely, a wonderful asset. From experience I can confirm that the opportunities for trail running and biking are almost endless. The woods are my escape at the end of a busy working week; they are where I come to clear my head when I have too much on my mind.
My office, however, is not in the woods – and I doubt my boss would approve if I requested that we up sticks and move to a shadier spot. As much as I would love to have a job in the countryside, I enjoy what I do now; and remote work is unfortunately not an option either.
In short: the woods are a wonderful asset, but they skew the statistics.
Without counting the densely green areas on the edge of the city, Vienna has 480,000 trees across an area of 335km2. There is a population of 2 million people.
London, meanwhile, has almost 10 million inhabitants, an area of 1,572 km2 – and around 8 million trees. That’s almost as many trees as humans. The capital of the United Kingdom may not have as many trams, but it scores well on its leaf count.
Munich, which is of more comparable size, has 1.7 million trees.
As far as sustainability and social policies go, Vienna can give itself a pat on the back for being a role model to other cities. But calling itself the ‘greenest’ city is misleading.
As Vienna gets hotter, the effect of trees on the climate is important. As well as providing shade, trees use heat to evaporate water – cooling the air by up to 12oC. Buildings that are naturally shaded may no longer need air conditioning, thereby also reducing energy consumption. And let’s not forget that trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Quality of life improves in other ways, too. Trees reduce air pollution by filtering out pollutants and particulate matter that are responsible for respiratory and cardiovascular diseases; leaves and trunk mitigate noise pollution by absorbing and dissipating sound waves. And when people can see trees, their wellbeing increases for at least eight hours – alongside a range of other mental health benefits.
Vienna has pledged to plant 4,000 trees every year. I have seen the evidence: young shoots that stand proudly taller than my five foot four. One day they will grow big and strong, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and providing shade to passers-by. And at some point next century perhaps there will be as many trees as humans here, too.