Den Uyl
There is no better way to celebrate spring than planting a tree. After all, forests provide a bounty of benefits. But there’s an obstacle to this seemingly simple gift to Mother Nature and ourselves: We don’t have enough trees to plant.
According to the National Research Council, forests clean more than two-thirds of all the nation’s water — filtering out pollutants and holding onto nutrients. They provide habitat for wildlife, giving room to roam for more than 4,000 forest-dependent wildlife and plant species in the US. Trees keep the air clean, provide beautiful places for outdoor recreation and support local economies and ways of life. Reforestation also is a low-tech, scalable solution to climate change.
In Michigan, there are 3.43 million acres of opportunity to restore forest cover, much of it across urban open space, pasture and marginal lands. That’s room for more than 1.9 billion trees, enough to capture 10.46 million tons of CO2 per year, or the equivalent of removing 2.26 million cars from the road.
Opportunities like this exist in every state, across private, public, and tribal lands, both in urban and rural settings. But to realize this enormous potential, U.S. tree nurseries need to increase production by an additional 1.7 billion seedlings each year — more than double the current nursery production. Only by increasing our capacity to plant trees will this need be met.
We need to invest resources across the entire reforestation “pipeline” — expanding capacity for seed collection and storage, tree nursery expansion, workforce development and improvements in pre- and post-planting practices. To encourage nursery expansion, we need to support low-interest or forgivable loans in addition to long-term contracts. We also need to incentivize reforestation on private land, where upfront costs are a barrier for many forest owners. These investments will create jobs in rural communities, not only in nurseries, but across the whole spectrum of reforestation activities.
Over the last several years, The Nature Conservancy in Michigan has been working with the U.S. Forest Service to plant trees in riparian areas in the Ottawa National Forest. By planting long-lived conifers such as white pine, tamarack, hemlock and white spruce, our work aims to restore species diversity in streamside forests, particularly in areas that have been affected by high tree mortality as a result of pests, including spruce budworm and the invasive emerald ash borer. These plantings help promote riparian habitat connectivity and resiliency and provide a source of shade and woody debris to help improve stream health, in addition to sequestering carbon.
The science is clear that nature-based solutions, like tree planting and improved management of our forests, are necessary for keeping our global emissions below dangerous levels to avoid the worst impact of climate change.
These solutions are cost-effective, readily available and popular. But we need to act now.
So, this spring, plant a tree. Then let’s invest in the reforestation pipeline to be sure we can keep doing so all year long.
About the author: John Den Uyl is forest and climate conservation project manager for The Nature Conservancy in Michigan.