American Forests’ Resilient Forests program restores forest health across the United States, Canada and Mexico. We focus on helping forests adapt to stressors that climate change is making more severe and more frequent. These include extreme wildfire, deep droughts and outbreaks of pests and disease.
By creating healthy forests, American Forests also helps to combat the climate crisis. Trees capture carbon pollution from the atmosphere and lock it safely away in their wood. The soil captures carbon too. The trees and soil, combined, make forests the most effective nature-based solution to climate change.
Reforestation is a key way that our Resilient Forests program restores forest health. With 148 million acres of former forest in the U.S. suitable for reforestation, the opportunity is gigantic. American Forests has planted more than 65 million trees in the last 30 years alone. As part of the Trillion Trees movement, we’ve pledged to plant 100 million more trees in large forest landscapes by 2030.
This program strives to achieve these goals by 2030:
American Forests has developed a multipronged vision for massively scaling up reforestation across the country. We identify priority places to plant trees — through tools such as forest carbon models and the Reforestation Hub — and advocate for policies and carbon financing to fund reforestation work. We invest in tree nurseries and seed collection efforts to increase the quality and quantity of seedlings that nurseries produce. And we manage forests in ways that will enhance their resiliency in the face of climate change.
American Forests’ mission is built on local, regional and national partnerships. These partnerships allow us to build longer lasting solutions and policies, carry out on-the-ground projects and research ways to advance climate-informed forestry. Throughout our work, we promote principles of shared stewardship, ensuring forest restoration efforts can match the sweeping scale of our country’s forest landscapes.