BILLINS, Mont. (AP) — The Biden administration said Monday that the government will plant more than one billion trees in millions of acres of burned and dead forests in the western United States as officials struggle to combat the growing damage to the nation’s forests from wildfires. insects and other manifestations of climate change.
Devastating fires in recent years, burning too hot for forests to regenerate naturally, have far outstripped the government’s capacity to plant new trees. That created a backlog of 4.1 million acres (1.7 million hectares) in need of replanting, officials said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it would need to quadruple the number of tree seedlings produced by nurseries to overcome the backlog and meet future needs. It comes after Congress passed bipartisan legislation last year ordering the Forest Service to plant 1.2 billion trees over the next decade, and after President Joe Biden in April ordered the agency to make the nation’s forests more resilient when the Earth’s orb is getting hotter.
Much of the administration’s broader agenda to address climate change remains stalled amid divisions in Congress, where Democrats hold a razor-thin majority. That has prompted officials to take a more piecemeal approach with incremental measures like Monday’s announcement as the administration considers whether to declare a climate emergency, which could open the door to more aggressive executive action.
To clear the backlog of cleared forest, the Forest Service plans to increase the work over the next few years from about 60,000 acres (24,000 hectares) replanted last year to about 400,000 acres (162,000 hectares) a year, officials said. Most of the work will be in the western states, where wildfires now occur year-round and the need is most pressing, said David Little, the agency’s director of forest management.
Fires have charred 5.6 million acres so far in the US this year, putting 2022 on track to match or exceed the record fire season of 2015, when 10.1 million acres (4.1 million hectares) burned.
Many forests recover naturally after fires, but if fires become too intense, they can leave behind barren landscapes that take decades before the trees return.
“Our forests, rural communities, agriculture and economy are linked in a shared landscape and their existence is at stake,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in a statement announcing the reforestation plan. “Only through bold climate action… can we secure their future.”
The Forest Service spent more than $100 million on reforestation activities this year. Spending is expected to increase further in coming years, to $260 million a year, under the sweeping federal infrastructure bill approved last year, agency officials said.
Some timber industry supporters criticized last year’s reforestation legislation as not doing enough to turn the tide on the scale of the wildfire problem. They want more aggressive logging to thin stands that have become overgrown from years of fire suppression.
To prevent such overgrowth in replanted areas, practices are being changed so that reforested stands are less dense with trees and therefore less prone to fire, said Joe Fargione, North American science director at the Nature Conservancy.
But challenges to the Forest Service’s goal remain, from finding enough seeds to hiring enough workers to plant them, Fargione said.
Many seedlings will die before maturity due to drought and insects, both of which may be exacerbated by climate change.
“You have to be careful where you plant,” Fargione said. “There are places where the climate has already changed enough that the likelihood of successful tree recovery is quite low.”
Living trees are a major “sink” of climate-changing carbon dioxide when it enters the atmosphere, Fargione said. This means that replacing those that die is important to avoid making climate change worse.
In 1980, Congress created a reforestation trust that had previously capped funding — coming from tariffs on timber products — at $30 million a year. That was enough money when the most significant need for reforestation came from logging, but became insufficient as the number of large, high-intensity fires increased, officials said.
Insects, disease, and logging also contribute to the amount of land that needs reforestation, but the majority comes from fires. In the last five years alone, more than 5 million acres have been severely burned.
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