The City of Montreal is offering to pay 50% of the cost of planting trees on commercial lands under a pilot project, CBC reported.

Planting usually costs $500 to $1,200 per tree. The city has expanded a public-property treeplanting program, launched in 2017, to include commercial sites.

“Greenspaces are already planted, so we are looking for more difficult places where we want to plant trees,” Laurence Lavigne-Lalonde, mayor of Montreal’s Villeray-Saint-Michel-Parc-Extension borough, told CBC.

“A company that has parking spaces, for example. We can go there and plant with them,” she added.

The program is designed to reduce heat islands in urban settings and offset climate change.

Companies and institutions are eligible for the funding, according to CBC. The city is currently looking for private sites on which trees could be planted.

Marie-Andrée Blouin, a City of Montreal urban planning advisor

“It’s pretty hard to find places where you can plant trees because there’s a lot of services present going underneath the sidewalks,” Marie-Andrée Blouin, a City of Montreal urban planning advisor, told CBC.

She suggest that both the city and commercial landowners can benefit from the pilot project.

“It’s a win-win because it increases freshness,” she told CBC.