This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WBEZ and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization

Rev. Brian Sauder had good news in January for 58 faith-based organizations across the Midwest: His Chicago environmental nonprofit, Faith in Place, would be giving each of them a grant to fund tree planting in low-income communities and create urban forestry jobs to maintain them. Those additional trees would help mitigate the effects of climate change and air pollution.

But the good news didn’t last long.

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed his “Unleashing American Energy” executive order, which abruptly froze the distribution of funds from the Biden administration’s sweeping climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. The move has left critical initiatives in limbo, including urban and community forestry programs like Sauder’s Faith in Place.

“To have to call up those grant awardees and say to them: ‘Hey, you need to stop work on this. We can’t reimburse you. There’s a lot of uncertainty right now.’ [It] was absolutely devastating,” said Sauder, whose organization has already had to lay off five employees as a result of the federal freeze.

The Inflation Reduction Act had pledged $1.5 billion to plant more trees in cities and ensure their survival, too. The funding, roughly 40 times what the federal government typically had spent on urban forestry, promised to transform the urban environment across the country. Nonprofits and local governments staffed up to administer the historic level of funding and made big promises to poor and minority communities to help “green” their neighborhoods. Now, organizations like Faith in Place, still unable to access federal funds, are facing the financial fallout.

“We’re a microcosm of what’s happening all across the country with these uncertainties and the government not keeping its commitment to these contracts,” Sauder said.

In response, Faith in Place has signed onto a lawsuit spearheaded by Earthjustice, a nonprofit that litigates national environmental issues. The suit seeks to compel the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which distributes the funds, to honor its financial commitments.

“The President cannot come in and say: ‘We’re not doing that, we’re not following the law that Congress legislated.’ That’s a violation of separation of powers,” said Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice.

The legal challenge comes as federal judges have ordered the government to release the Inflation Reduction Act funds already appropriated by Congress, but the USDA is still reviewing the Biden-era dollars. The freeze has stalled hundreds of urban forestry projects nationwide, including one to improve Portland’s shrinking tree canopy, an initiative to restore the more than 200,000 trees lost in New Orleans in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina and plans to redress the longstanding disparity in tree coverage across Chicago’s majority Black and Latino communities on the city’s South and West sides.

Faith in Place was set to receive its $1.9 million grant to increase tree cover in low-income communities and develop an urban forestry workforce. It then planned to distribute $1.6 million to dozens of faith-based organizations throughout Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.

Those plans are on hold. In a statement the USDA said it was in the process of reviewing all grants and while it had authorized some “mission critical” services to resume, it could not provide information on individual grants.

At the Stone Temple Baptist Church in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood, the federal money was supposed to cover the cost of planting fruit trees in its community garden, providing the majority Black community with seasonal access to pears, peaches, apples and plums.

“The goal was to get the trees in the ground this spring,” Sauder said. But that’s not happening amidst the funding uncertainty.

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

Trees are key to mitigating the effects of climate change

As cities like Chicago grapple with rising global temperatures, improving the urban canopy — the layer of collective tree cover in a city — isn’t just about beautifying the neighborhood. Trees help reduce air pollution and are increasingly among the most cost effective ways to mitigate the impacts of climate change, according to Vivek Shandas, who researches climate change in cities at Portland State University and is a member of the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council.

“Trees are there very quietly, providing essential ecosystem services,” Shandas said. “Every single day, they’re cleaning the air, they’re cooling the neighborhoods, they’re absorbing the rainwater, and they’re doing all of these things for absolutely free.”

The problem: Chicago’s urban tree canopy is unevenly distributed across the city — often favoring whiter, wealthier neighborhoods — and it’s also shrinking due to disease and urban development. The city’s canopy cover dropped from 19% to 16% between 2010 and 2020, according to a report from The Morton Arboretum.

The hope was that the increased federal funding would transform Chicago’s urban canopy. The 58 grants that Faith in Place had planned to distribute included funds for 16 projects to plant and maintain approximately 280 trees across Chicago.

The funding freeze has also halted plans to plant trees statewide.

The Trump administration paused nearly $14 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding promised to the state of Illinois for projects that included hazard tree removal and pruning, tree plantings, tree inventories, and other work related to tree canopy management in Illinois communities.

As the federal review drags on, the future of these projects remains uncertain.

“It’s really upsetting that the government’s not keeping their end of the bargain,” Sauder said. “We’ve kept our commitment, and they aren’t keeping their commitment to us.”

Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco covers climate change and the environment for WBEZ and Grist. Follow him on X at @__juanpab.