প্রকাশ: 26/07/2022
The Biden
administration on Monday said the government will plant more than one billion
trees across millions of acres of burned and dead woodlands in the US West, as
officials struggle to counter the increasing toll on the nation's forests from
wildfires, insects and other manifestations of climate change.
Destructive fires in recent years that burned too hot for
forests to regrow naturally have far outpaced the government's capacity to
plant new trees. That has created a backlog of 4.1 million acres (1.7 million
hectares) in need of replanting, officials said.
The US Agriculture Department said 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.
Much of the administration's broader agenda to tackle
climate change remains stalled amid disagreement in Congress, where Democrats
hold a razor-thin majority. That has left officials to pursue a more piecemeal
approach with incremental measures such as Monday's announcement, while the
administration considers whether to declare a climate emergency that could open
the door to more aggressive executive branch actions.
To erase the backlog of decimated forest acreage, the Forest
Service plans over the next couple years to scale up work from about 60,000
acres (24,000 hectares) replanted last year to about 400,000 acres (162,000
hectares) annually, officials said. Most of the work will be in western states where
wildfires now occur year round and the need is most pressing, said David Lytle,
the agency's director of forest management.
Blazes have charred 5.6 million acres so far in the US this
year, putting 2022 on track to match or exceed the record-setting 2015 fire
season, when 10.1 million acres (4.1 million hectares) burned.
Many forests regenerate naturally after fires, but if the
blazes get too intense they can leave behind barren landscapes that linger for
decades before trees come back.
"Our forests, rural communities, agriculture and
economy are connected across a shared landscape and their existence is at
stake," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement announcing
the reforestation plan. "Only through bold, climate-smart actions ... can
we ensure their future."
The Forest Service this year is spending more than $100
million on reforestation work. Spending is expected to further increase in
coming years, to as much as $260 million annually, under the sweeping federal
infrastructure bill approved last year, agency officials said.
Some timber industry supporters were critical of last year's
reforesting legislation as insufficient to turn the tide on the scale of the
wildfire problem. They want more aggressive logging to thin stands that have become
overgrown from years of suppressing fires.
To prevent replanted areas from becoming similarly
overgrown, practices are changing so reforested stands are less dense with
trees and therefore less fire prone, said Joe Fargione, science director for
North America at the Nature Conservancy.
But challenges to the Forest Service's goal remain, from
finding enough seeds to hiring enough workers to plant them, Fargione said.
Many seedlings will die before reaching maturity due to
drought and insects, both of which can be exacerbated by climate change.
"You've got to be smart about where you plant,"
Fargione said. "There are some places that the climate has already changed
enough that it makes the probability of successfully reestablishing trees
pretty low."
Living trees are a major "sink" for carbon dioxide
that's driving climate change when it enters the atmosphere, Fargione said.
That means replacing those that die is important to keep climate change from
getting even worse.
Congress in 1980 created a reforestation trust that had
previously capped funding — which came from tariffs on timber products — at $30
million annually. That was enough money when the most significant need for
reforestation came from logging, but became insufficient as the number of large,
high-intensity fires increased, officials said.
Insects, disease and timber harvests also contribute to the
amount of land that needs reforestation work, but the vast majority comes from
fires. In the past five years alone more than 5 million acres were severely
burned.
– AP/UNB
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