Abstract

This thesis offers a decision-making framework to select the best land near a city for private investment in multiple-use urban forestry. More specifically, this thesis postulates that privately financed forest restoration for multiple-use urban forestry can add green infrastructure to ecologically impoverished landscapes in a city's rural-urban fringe. A strategic framework simplifies complex decision-making in land selection problems, and here a multi-criteria Boolean algebraic truth table is used to create the framework. A truth table cell is set to either true (YES) or false (NO) by checking the land plot conditions against each land selection criteria. The selection criteria included biophysical factors, zoning types, and threat of takings. The approach is illustrated with a bottomland area along the St. Jacques River, in the City of La Prairie, in Montreal's rural-urban fringe. A major conclusion is that a Boolean decision-making framework may be useful to evaluate property acquisition before making private forest investments. Of the property selection criteria examined, stability of property rights may be the most important to consider first. While private investment in forest restoration for future uses could add new forests in urban areas, several important regulatory takings cases in the past 20 years in the Montreal region may discourage investors from making long-term investments. To encourage reforestation of underused degraded land, policy makers should consider regulatory reform, permitting multiple-use urban forestry near the city, and that this be combined with land tenure reform, thus encouraging private investment in green infrastructure.