To help combat the climate crisis, the United States needs to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and planting billions of trees is one of the most effective ways to do that. But where are the best places to plant? These should be areas that are not only cost-effective for planting, but also that offer important co-benefits such as flood mitigation and wildlife habitat.
Developed in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, the Reforestation Hub helps answer this question. This online tool offers the most comprehensive reforestation data ever assembled for the United States. Users can find reforestation opportunities in their county or state and run this data through filters, including current land use and land ownership. This tool shows how many trees are needed to reforest a given piece of land and how much carbon a revived forest could store.
To reforest the 148 million U.S. acres in the next 15 years, our nation’s tree nurseries need to more than triple production from 1.4 billion to 5.1 billion seedlings grown every year.