NBRO Involvement on the Establishment of Guidelines for Tree Risk Assessment

Trees are highly valuable resource in urban areas in many ways. However, with the development of facilities such as roads, buildings, plants, communication systems etc. some of trees may become hazardous by damaging and injuring the community. Specially, trees on roadsides would be highly hazard due to the instability with high rain and wind conditions. Heavy rain triggered floods, mudslides and downed trees in several places in the country threatening human lives and properties. It has experienced increasing such incidents during previous weeks in Colombo and other areas which caused the loss of several lives. Due to the increasing of these tragic incidents happening with tree falls recently, NBRO has been requested to study and coordinate devising a mechanism to minimize such disasters.

The management should seek to enhance their significance, ecosystem services, biodiversity, and social benefits they provide to manage the undesirable impacts they can have such as damage to property and risk to human safety. A tree risk management plan fills this information gap and provides the community with a systematic approach to accurately identify moderate to high-risk trees, and initiate the timely removal or corrective treatment of hazardous trees after the process of inspecting and assessing trees for their potential to injure people or damage property due to tree falling through a Tree Risk Assessment. Accordingly, we should expand our studies on the stability of plants with high rainfall and wind conditions and should develop the capacity of NBRO staff.

As an initiative of this programme, an onsite training was conducted at the Botanical Garden, Peradeniya in the previous week to train a team onsite targeting to conduct a comprehensive Tree Risk Assessment.