The REPLANT Act provides money for the US Forest Service to plant more than a billion trees in the next nine years.
The REPLANT Act provides money for the US Forest Service to plant more than a billion trees in the next nine years. The World Economic Forum aims to help plant a trillion trees around the world by 2030. Many US cities have plans to shade their streets with millions of trees. Major government and private funding is being invested in planting trees as a powerful tool to fight climate change, protect water, clean air, and cool cities. In short, trees are hot.
But new research shows a troubling bottleneck that could threaten these efforts: U.S. tree nurseries don’t grow close to enough trees—nor have the species diversity needed—to meet ambitious plans.
“Trees are this amazing natural solution to a lot of our challenges, including climate change. We urgently need to plant many millions of them,” says University of Vermont scientist Tony D’Amato who co-led the new research. “But what this paper points out is that we are woefully underserved by any kind of regional or national scale inventory of seedlings to get the job done.”
Read more at: University of Vermont
University of Vermont forest scientists Peter Clark and Tony D'Amato at an experimental forest in Vemont. They led new research showing a troubling bottleneck that could threaten efforts to fight climate change with tree planting: U.S. tree nurseries don’t grow close to enough trees—nor have the species diversity needed—to meet ambitious planting goals. (Photo Credit: Joshua Brown/UVM)
