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hatrack

(59,439 posts)
Wed Apr 7, 2021, 07:16 AM Apr 2021

If We're Going To Plant Trees, We Might Want To Deal W. Annual Shortfall Of 2 Billion Seedlings

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Over the past decade, interest in reforestation has soared. Climate change, an increase in wildfires, and the need for huge carbon sinks to remove emissions from the atmosphere have increased the demand for trees and dense forests. Companies like CitiBank, Microsoft, Amazon and many others that have made net-zero carbon commitments; to fulfil these goals, they will have to buy carbon credits from organizations and nonprofits that protect or plant forests to offset emissions. In January, Elon Musk tweeted: “Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology.” Many of the responses can be summed up by designer Martin Darby, who tweeted in reply: “I have invented a concept called planting trees. Where do I send my bank details?”

But while there’s a huge focus on planting trees, there’s little on where those seedlings will come from. A study published in February in Frontiers in Forest and Global Change, authored by 17 environmental scientists, including ones from the Nature Conservancy, the USDA Forest Service, American Forests, and academic institutions, outlines that we are already short more than 2 billion seedlings per year—and that’s just to get halfway to meeting the reforesting potential of the lower 48 states. They estimated that there are 133 million acres to reforest by the year 2040, which would require 34 billion seedlings. According to the study, the US currently produces about 1.3 billion seedlings a year, which means a 2.4-fold increase is needed.

“There were increasing public calls for dramatically scaling up reforestation,” says Joseph Fargione, science director for the Nature Conservancy’s North America region and the study’s lead researcher. “The people that work in the industry were aware that would be hard to do because of the supply chain challenges. But most people outside the industry weren’t.” Even nonprofit carbon offset project developers like the Arbor Day Foundation, who have access to private money from companies that have made net-zero pledges, know a squeeze is coming. “We’re going to have to increase the seedling production in order to meet the demand and the opportunities at hand,” says foundation president Dan Lambe. “We see that coming in the next couple of years.”

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“They need to get a seed from that geographic area, from the right elevation, from the right species of tree, and grow those seeds in a nursery for a year or plus,” says Marcus Selig, vice president of field programs at the National Forest Foundation. “Then they take the seedlings back to that exact place to regenerate the trees. It’s just a really involved process.” We are running out of people who know these nuances. “There are just a handful of people who know how to collect seeds for nurseries,” says Austin Rempel, one of the scientists involved in the study and the senior forest restoration manager at American Forests, a nonprofit conservation group. “And pretty much everyone we talked to says, ‘This might be my last year.’ No one is coming up behind them. They’re on the verge of retirement and they don’t really have a succession plan.”

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https://www.wired.com/story/reforestation-is-great-but-were-running-out-of-seeds/

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If We're Going To Plant Trees, We Might Want To Deal W. Annual Shortfall Of 2 Billion Seedlings (Original Post) hatrack Apr 2021 OP
Tree planting proposals rely on monocultures too much as is NickB79 Apr 2021 #1
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