AS WE LEAVE BEHIND one of the hottest summers on record, it is encouraging that the federal government has just released more than $1 billion in grants from the administration’s Inflation Reduction Act to help communities build broader, healthier, and more equitable urban forests.

The city of Boston received over $11 million, Springfield $6 million, and Fall River, Haverhill, and Holyoke all $1 million each.

These funds will support everything from tree inventories to workforce training for a new generation of urban foresters. Most significantly, these dollars will enable cities to plant tens of thousands of trees, especially in environmental justice communities. These communities often lack significant canopy cover, are therefore significantly hotter in summer, and are also frequently home to populations who are more vulnerable to heat-related illness and even death.

We should celebrate the scale and significance of this investment, one that recognizes that trees are a vital part of our public health and climate-adaptation infrastructure.

But we can’t sit back. The sad fact is that most people think of trees as a decorative background to daily life. A nice to have, not a need to have. To change this outlook and ensure we all do our part to preserve and expand our urban forests, we need to take a cue from this scale of federal investment. We need, at the local level, to begin to treat the urban forest like we do our other public utilities. We need to regulate our urban forest. Here’s why.

First, in most cities more land is privately owned than is under municipal control. In the City of Cambridge 58 percent of tree canopy is on private land. And 66 percent of the space that might accommodate new tree planting is private. Nearly two thirds of that is around homes and apartments. If the average resident does not do their part, we can’t grow the forest.

Second, despite the public presumption that developers and the city itself were to blame for persistently falling canopy cover in Cambridge, 72 percent of the canopy loss between 2008 and 2018 was actually on private residential lots. Individual property-owners making personal choices. But the impacts add up to the point that no matter how much planting the city does, it’s a losing battle.

In the nineteenth century, in response to polluted drinking water and disease, cities built networks of sewer pipes. But a sewer system doesn’t do much good if nobody invests in flushing toilets or connecting their pipes to the street. With heat becoming the leading climate-related cause of death, the lack of trees is our generation’s public health crisis.

So, like connecting our homes to the sewer system, we each need to preserve and plant trees on our own properties — trees that shade our homes and our neighbors’ homes and often the public sidewalks outside our houses.

To ensure private acts support the common good, communities need to pass cooling-focused regulation. To some these recommendations will seem small acts and obvious reforms. To others they will feel like government overreach and a heavy hand on private property. But an expansive and resilient urban forest requires that we all cede some autonomy, even though that’s not necessarily a popular idea in this political climate.

To start, every community needs a tree protection ordinance. We can’t try to stop all tree removals. So, instead of being punitive, ordinances should encourage the dynamic cycling of a natural forest. Communications efforts should discourage people from taking down healthy trees. But if you really need to remove a tree, you should be able to and you should have a responsibility to plant and nurture new trees to someday take its place. If you can’t plant trees yourself, you should cover the cost of planting and maintaining new trees elsewhere and until they are established — usually about 5 years. Cities must work to make these ordinances equitable, creating sliding scales that don’t allow the wealthy to easily buy their way out of their responsibility or that further burden those with fewer financial resources.

But tree protection ordinances are defensive. Zoning is much a much more powerful tool to guide development. And with the pace of development in many cities, zoning is one of the most powerful ways to shape a cooler future for everyone. Every municipality should rewrite its urban design guidelines and zoning ordinances to include requirements that encourage cooling. Like Cambridge’s Green Factor these systems give property owners flexibility in how they wish to develop their land, but it requires them to do their part to cool the city. These rating systems should mostly highly value retaining mature existing trees, especially those closest to the public realm, but they can also encourage a broad range of climate cooling strategies including green roofs, pervious surfaces, and other planted elements.

Regulation needs to be equitable, and caring for trees can be expensive. Economically disadvantaged groups who often live in the neighborhoods most in need may not have the means to meet these goals themselves. Therefore, cities need to build public/private partnerships that subsidize planting and maintenance of trees on private property and that help mitigate any potential risks property owners take on as they help build the urban forest together.

Hopefully your community is one of those which benefits from the IRA funds and the expanding interest in planting more trees in our cities. But if your community doesn’t have or hasn’t recently updated its urban forest regulations, put down that shovel and gather together to take political action in support of smart urban forest regulation. It’s the most effective tool to cool your neighborhood and it’s the only way we ensure we all do our part.

Eric F. Kramer is a principal at Reed Hilderbrand LLC, a landscape architecture firm in Cambridge.