Investing in #Forests4Climate - An American Forests Data Short

Plant in neighborhoods with the greatest need with the help of Tree Equity Score

This unprecedented funding will support planting and maintaining a game-changing 33.2 million trees.

Where we plant matters. American Forests created Tree Equity Score to provide a national, science-based standard to help cities and towns prioritize investment in trees. Tree Equity Score focuses on areas with the greatest need to advance climate justice and address damaging environmental inequities such as air pollution and extreme heat.

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Maintain existing urban trees to maximize their life-saving benefits

Trees are critical infrastructure in cities. Urban forests account for almost 20% of the sequestration of carbon in U.S. forests and reduce home heating and cooling costs by nearly $8 billion nationally each year . Yet the projected loss of tree canopy in urban areas is 8.3% by 2060 . This funding can help cities retain the critical services of the existing urban tree canopy and reduce household energy consumption and utilities costs.

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Scale up the urban forestry workforce

There is a labor shortage in the tree-care industry. Planting and caring for trees requires skilled workers. There is an annual need for approximately 8,300 tree-care workers nationwide. Creating Tree Equity creates tree-care jobs that are critical for delivering the benefits of a robust urban tree canopy. These jobs can benefit local residents, in particular through expansion of training, job creation and job retention for disadvantaged communities and populations.

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An urban tree care professional performs maintenance work on an urban tree in a downtown area.

Scale up controlled fire to prevent intense, dangerous wildfire

North America's Indigenous communities have known for centuries that setting moderate fires protects and rejuvenates the land and prevents intense, dangerous wildfire. Controlled fires clear overgrown brush, weed out small and unhealthy trees, and reduce dry, flammable fuels that feed a fire to excess. Scientific models can now identify high-hazard areas with high fuel loads to help foresters target those landscapes and prevent fires from spiraling beyond suppression.

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Accelerate preventative action in near-urban landscapes

An estimated 50 million homes are currently in the wildland-urban interface in the U.S., a number increasing by 1 million houses every three years . Years of catastrophic fires have crystallized the need for active forest management and fire resilience practices. Creating fire-resilient forests in areas surrounding human development reduces risk to human lives and property, ensures the longevity of water and other essential resources, and supports the sustainability of forest products.

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Broaden natural forest resilience with climate-smart strategies

Scientists and foresters have identified a suite of climate-smart techniques, such as forest thinning, prescribed burning practices, climate-resilient seed collection and cluster planting, that can make forests more resilient to fire, drought, pests and disease. Climate-smart planning also relies on shared stewardship models, in which organizations join forces and work across jurisdictional lines to manage wildfire and protect large forest landscapes and watersheds.

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A female firefighter works on a controlled burn in a conifer forest.

Extend scientific assessment of burned areas to allocate effective treatments

Severely burned forests may not regenerate naturally and risk a permanent shift to a landscape of highly flammable grass and shrubs. This leaves communities vulnerable to landslides and offers little of the benefits to wildlife, water and climate that a healthy forest provides. Post-fire restoration assessments can help foresters target data-driven restoration treatments and prioritize revegetation in wildfire scars that cannot naturally regenerate.

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Step up climate-smart reforestation techniques

The climate crisis is taking a toll on forests. With our forests increasingly at risk, the way we manage and restore these landscapes needs to evolve. Depending on the site, climate-smart reforestation tactics include planting species-diverse mixes of native trees in varying densities where they will thrive in the future, removing invasive species and other plants that compete with seedlings, setting controlled burns, and selectively thinning overcrowded forests.

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Fast-track growth along the reforestation pipeline

Tree nurseries in the U.S. are not equipped to keep up with growing reforestation demands. The sudden demands for seedlings after extreme wildfire seasons and weather events are already leading to serious undersupply.

Scaling up reforestation requires stable market demand for nurseries and skilled workforce training to source climate-resilient seed stock; collect, process and grow seeds; and conduct outplanting, site prep and post-planting monitoring.

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Three workers dig a trench to replant a burned mountainside.

Promote and support private landowner forestry

Private landowners control the largest amount of forested land in the U.S. Providing voluntary incentives via a trusted set of programs for families and disadvantaged landowners can reduce barriers to utilizing climate-smart forestry and land stewardship practices. Solutions must support the needs of landowners, including economic viability.

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Advance tree planting and protection in agricultural landscapes

Silvopasture is the practice of integrating trees in pasturelands. The promising climate gains from silvopasture can complement existing grazing operations. Adopted more widely in Europe, silvopasture can help farmers and ranchers diversify their income streams and provides beneficial shade and additional feedstock for pasture animals. Scaling up adoption in the U.S. will require technical assistance for landowners to implement at scale.

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Boost research and markets for wood innovation

Climate solutions can be creative. Low-value wood materials from wildfire management efforts such as thinning can be transformed into inventive wood products such as biochar or nano cellulose additions to concrete. This opens possibilities for greener building materials that keep the carbon stored in that wood from reentering the atmosphere. These bills earmark funding for research, incentives and market development wood innovation.

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Expand forest protection from permanent conversion and loss

America's forests and forest products together capture and store enough carbon to offset approximately 17% of the nation's annual carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels . Yet land conversion and climate-driven threats such as disease, pests and drought are rapidly depleting crucial forest land. This funding will help support active, generational stewardship to ensure healthy forests continue to capture and store vast quantities of carbon.

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Bolster old-growth forest protection and management

One study of U.S. national forests across the West found that its most ancient trees, just 3% of the total, contain a stunning 42% of carbon stored in these forests. Saving old-growth forests requires more than basic protections. These iconic trees are succumbing to wildfire. The 2020 Castle Fire in California, for example, destroyed between 7,500 and 10,600 sequoias with trunks larger than 4 feet. These irreplaceable ecosystems must be managed and protected to foster resilience in the face of climate change.

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Morning sun peeks through the trees in Olympic National Park.

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American Forests creates healthy and resilient forests, from cities to large natural landscapes, that deliver essential benefits for climate, people, water and wildlife. We advance our mission through forestry innovation, place-based partnerships to plant and restore forests, and movement building.

Learn more about us at americanforests.org

Credits

Carbon impact analysis by Kendall DeLyser

Article and visualizations by Julia Twichell

Methods

Urban Forestry Carbon Impact Estimates

Urban tree planting and maintenance carbon value estimated utilizing literature values of carbon storage, planting cost, maintenance cost and avoided energy emissions per tree (Nowak et al. (2013), Nowak et al. (2017), Nowak & Greenfield (2018), Nowak et al. (2021), Kroeger et al. (2018)). Avoided energy emissions benefits phased out to meet 2035 clean energy goal, following EPRI (2021).

Wildfire Resilience Carbon Impact Estimates

Funding assigned to fire risk reduction and vegetation management includes restoration/reforestation activities, fuels reduction treatments and avoided wildfire emissions. Actual impacts may be greater when including additional wood product and substitution benefits from use of restoration byproducts. Please consider these topline numbers using available information. These carbon emissions projections are derived by the U.S. Forest Service from RPA imputation modeling, including RPA forest dynamics (including forest age, density, growth rates, fire and removals), land use and global trade models. Stochasticity is built into some of these parameters, so the model is ideally run many times to allow the most robust numbers (average, or central tendency) to clearly emerge. This is in addition to necessary assumptions made in the model parameterization and investment application.

Wildfire Recovery Carbon Impact Estimates

Carbon value estimated utilizing EVALIDator C Estimates model developed by American Forests utilizing forest carbon stocks and fluxes from USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis; reforestation costs and needs from U.S. Forest Service; estimated grant cost-share from Forest Legacy Program.

Forest Protection Carbon Impact Estimates

Conservation easement carbon value estimated utilizing EVALIDator C Estimates model developed by American Forests utilizing forest carbon stocks and fluxes from USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis, percent forest loss during conversion ( NLCD, 2011) and five-year average program cost per acre from the Forest Legacy Program. Assumes 90% of FLP easements are additional, meaning forest would not have been conserved without the easement - carbon benefits are scaled accordingly.

Old-growth inventory and protection activities are assumed to largely consist of reducing fire risk and supporting ecosystem resilience (i.e. hazardous fuel reductions and vegetation management activities). Carbon estimation assumptions same as in the Wildfire Resilience section above.

Private & Working Forests Carbon Impact Estimates

All EQIP, CSP and RCPP (collectively, NRCS) program dollars budgeted under the IRA are assumed to be spent on Climate Smart Agriculture and Forestry (CSAF) conservation practices, as specified for Fiscal Year 2022. The greenhouse gas benefits provided by each forestry practice (tree/shrub establishment and silvopasture) are estimated using FIA data and literature estimates from Eagle et al. (2012). The per acre cost of each practice is based on California EQIP and CSP payment schedules (where relevant, cost per tree/shrub or linear feet are converted to acres). We specify five categories of conservation practices and assume the following budget allocation by category: 20% on cover crops, 10% on tree planting practices, 20% on nitrogen management, 10% on livestock (anaerobic digesters) and 40% on other soil health, grazing and pasture, and wildlife habitat practices. We assume conservation practices will continue on enrolled acres after the initial year of enrollment, but at discounted levels. These so-called "conservation legacy effects" are also specified by category: 25% for cover crops, 75% for tree planting practices, 10% for nitrogen management, 96% for livestock, 75% for other soil health, grazing and pasture, and wildlife habitat practices. We assume conservation legacy effects are constant for five years after the initial year of enrollment and then decline exponentially on an annual basis.

Private landowner incentive benefits are calculated based on a payment of $13/tonne CO₂e (estimate gathered from Trove Research and University College London 2021, EDF 2018, Ecosystem Services Marketplace 2021) to lands with higher than baseline stocks; average participant carbon stocks, growth rates, market dynamics and private sector engagement from American Forest Foundation Family Forest Carbon Program and USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis.

Wood Innovation Carbon Impact Estimates

Wood innovation projections developed based upon literature values of embodied, stored and avoided emissions as well as projected market growth, additional to existing projections in the absence of IRA and IIJA investments (FPInnovations (2020), AWC.CWC (2020), Puettman et al. (2018), Nepal et al. (2016)).

Carbon Equivalencies

Carbon Equivalencies were calculated with the EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator. New York City 2020 carbon emissions were reported on by the city in their 2021 study, Pathways to Carbon-Neutral NYC.

All content 2022 American Forests. Please acknowledge American Forests in the use and distribution of this product.