Seattle is known as the Emerald City, but over the past couple decades it’s been losing a lot of what makes it green. The city’s most recent tree canopy assessment, released in 2021, found that Seattle’s tree cover had dropped to 28.1 percent -- short of a goal set nearly 15 years earlier of getting canopy coverage to at least 30 percent.

To protect more trees from development, many urban forest advocates have spent years asking for an update to rules for removing and replacing trees in Seattle. On Tuesday, those rules were finally updated.