Your local park has a hidden talent: helping fight climate change

and threaten native species. In the most extreme cases, the effects of global climate change temporarily make some parks in the U.S. downright dangerous for humans.

City parks can be wild and remote, even if they’re in the backyard. Here, early morning hikers rest before walking down Piestewa Peak, one of many mountainous city parks in Phoenix. “There’s, like, a 5 million-person city right there. And then you turn out here, and you could be in the high desert,” says Claire Miller, a longtime park supervisor in Phoenix.

Basketball players take advantage of the relative cool of the evening in Philadelphia’s Lemon Hill Park. Matt McCaw manages such fires for the city of Austin. He says setting up a successful controlled burn requires a lot of expertise: You need to choose where and when to set it, and you need to understand exactly how it will behave so it doesn’t get out of control. He brings two decades of fire experience to his job managing land for the Austin Parks and Recreation department.

But keeping trees healthy is a huge part of protecting parks and people from climate change. Stands of diverse and native trees absorb and trap more carbon dioxide than other types of greenery. The carbon stored in the forests of New York City is equal to the carbon released by more than 400,000 cars driving for a year,Clemente and Maya Perez with their mother Sara Momii Roberts and dog Santino in leafy Prospect Park in Brooklyn, N.Y. .

Supporting native plants can help parks be more resilient. “Not only are they more able to respond to the changing climate, in a large extreme event for example, but they’re also part of the cultural history,” says ecologist Alex Hodges, formerly of the Central Park Conservancy in New York City. Ryan Kellman/NPR

The goal is to use Central Park, the grandfather of American city parks, as a testing ground that eventually helps inform park management across the country. But it’s become clear that no amount of training is sufficient on the hottest days. Last year, two city firefighters from an elite mountain rescue squad ended up in the hospital after doing back-to-back rescues from city park trails on a day when temperatures lingered near 115 degrees.

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