US to Plant More Trees to Offset Impact of Climate Change
US to plant more trees as climate change kills off forests
As US officials work to counteract the increasing toll on the nation’s forests from wildfires, insects, and other signs of climate change, the Biden administration said on Monday (7-25-22) that the government will plant more than one billion trees across millions of acres of burned and dead woodland in the Western US.
According to US Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials, in recent years, devasting wildfires that have burned too hot for forests to regrow themselves naturally have outpaced the government’s ability to plant new trees. As a result, a back log of 4.1 million acres in need of replanting has developed.
The USDA says it will have to quadruple the number of tree seedlings produced by nurseries to get through the backlog and meet future needs. That comes after Congress last year passed bipartisan legislation directing the Forest Service to plant 1.2 billion trees over the next decade, and after President Joe Biden in April ordered the agency to make the nation’s forests more resilient as the globe gets hotter.
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