Photo Credit: Andrew Studer / American Forests
AMERICAN FORESTS is launching into a new era of national and global leadership that reflects our proud 148-year history. I am writing as I fly back from the COP28 climate talks in Dubai, where we leveraged America’s leadership on Tree Equity and climate-resilient reforestation to spark a global movement in both areas.
We worked to help secure billions of dollars for this work in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. And since last summer, American Forests has signed major new agreements to help implement those funds in partnership with agencies across the federal government. These include our $50 million Tree Equity Catalyst Initiative and Fund and an agreement with the National Park Service to restore the federally listed whitebark pine in 10 iconic national parks.
We are shifting from movement building to mobilization. All of American Forests’ skills and capacities can assist these federal efforts, from multi-partner facilitation and community engagement to forest science, project management and workforce development.
Among our new initiatives, one stands out for its unprecedented scope: our Keystone Agreement with the U.S. Forest Service to co-lead implementation of the REPLANT Act for climate-resilient reforestation across America’s national forests. In this co-leadership role, we will pursue three key activities: facilitating a process with each Forest Service region to assess and prioritize reforestation and develop a 10-year action plan; collaborating on climate-resilient reforestation plans customized for each region; and leading the effort to build out the reforestation supply chain to provide the people and inputs needed for each step of the process, including seeds and seedlings.
This new partnership will be powered by funding from the REPLANT Act, legislation that American Forests conceived and worked into law through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act so the Forest Service would have funding that matches the scale of the climate-fueled reforestation crisis on our national forests. The REPLANT Act provides the Forest Service with unfettered access to a permanent Reforestation Trust Fund that can provide as much as a ten-fold increase over prior funding levels.
I’m proud that American Forests has been preparing for this by developing globally leading approaches to climate-resilient reforestation and figuring out how to scale them up. Climate-resilient reforestation requires selecting the right tree species with the right genetic composition and planting them in the right ways on each site to match our new climate reality. You can think of this as “pre-storing” forests for the future instead of “restoring” them for our climatic past.
We’ve been particularly successful in deploying this new approach to climate-resilient reforestation on national forests and other federal lands in California, where the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, CALFIRE, American Forests, Salesforce and other partners have come together to develop climate-resilient reforestation plans for severely damaged areas such as the Camp Fire burn scar.
These plans identify microsites of natural resilience and prescribe a climate-adapted mixture of tree species. To enhance the resilience of these trees, we grow seedlings from seed sourced from trees that show natural resilience to disease, pests, and hotter, drier climate conditions. We strategically design the density, grouping and spacing of trees on these sites to facilitate “good fire,” including prescribed fire, while reducing the chance of catastrophic burns that leave behind only dead trees and devastated soils.
Photo Credit: Andrew Studer / American Forests
To build a complete reforestation supply chain, we must attend to sometimes-overlooked details such as collecting enough seed and growing enough seedlings to match the specifications in our science-based plans. This will be powered by innovations like our California Cone Corps that is training and deploying young people to help fill a yawning gap in seed supplies, and our new nursery partnerships across the American West with private landowners, tribes and others.
We can’t do this big job alone, and part of our service leadership role is to create opportunities for states, tribes, NGOs and community-based organizations to help.
American Forests’ corporate partners such as The Coca-Cola Foundation, AES and Clif Bar will be supercharging their support through our new REPLANT initiative, designed to support all aspects of our role under the Keystone Agreement. The U.S. Chapter of 1t.org led by American Forests will act as an “Implementation Hub” that helps all of our partners find their place.
We urgently need climate-resilient national forests to sustain the vital benefits they provide — carbon sequestration, clean drinking water, wildlife habitat, recreation and much more. Climate-resilient reforestation at this scale has implications even beyond the U.S. Every country on Earth urgently needs to figure this out. With our national forests out front, America and American Forests are ready to show the way. Thanks as always for your generous support that helps us make it happen.
For more news and updates from Jad, follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @JadDaley