US Government Joins the Trillion Tree Initiative

The United States has announced that it will join the Trillion Tree Initiative. There has been no statement on the details of what the US will do as part of the Trillion Tree Initiative.

There were once six trillion trees on the planet, now there are only three trillion and we’re still losing ten billion trees per year. That leads to a changing climate, a shrinking habitat for wildlife, and harder lives for billions of people. The scale of the problem calls for radical action.

One trillion trees protected and restored can reverse these trends and create a world where forests are expanding, not shrinking. This is essential to delivering on the Paris Agreement to avoid dangerous climate change, to restoring nature and the biodiversity we depend on and to securing a prosperous future for us all.

Trillion Trees has core funding from Restore Our Planet for the first phase (2017-2021). This is being used to provide direct support to field programmes and to leverage additional funds to support landscape ventures and sectoral change initiatives.

Are they planting one trillion trees?

No. Planting trees is just one approach we will take. They aim to reduce deforestation, improve forest protection and advance restoration. Restoration involves both tree planting and natural forest regeneration, with strategies determined by the local context. In most settings, this will involve promoting native species in mixed stands, as similar as possible to natural forests and, where feasible, achieved through assisted natural regeneration to minimise costs and maximise the environmental value. In other cases, there will be significant benefits from planting trees in agricultural landscapes (for example in woodlots or through agroforestry). This can provide sustainable fuel, food and fibre – supporting livelihood benefits and reducing pressure on natural forests – and can improve the sustainability and resilience of agricultural production.

Trillion Trees is a collaboration between three of the world’s largest conservation organizations, founded on a vision of a world where tree cover is expanding not shrinking.

Going beyond zero-deforestation requires more than effective local or regional projects. Certain commodities are having a devastating effect on the world’s tropical forests, but need to be tackled through their entire supply chains. There are a lot of efforts already underway to tackle deforestation linked to the biggest culprits – soy, beef, and palm oil for example – and our organizations are already contributing to these. Therefore, they are focusing on others that so far have received less attention, such as cocoa and rubber.

On the forefront of forest conservation innovation, our Trillion Trees Landscape Ventures are showing what is possible in terms of sustainable production, and our work at the global level links these models to the companies, sector platforms, and government policies that can mainstream best practice.

63 thoughts on “US Government Joins the Trillion Tree Initiative”

  1. If the ecosystem changes, that management gets a lot harder. Australian and New Zealand firefighters have traditionally gone to help Canadian and US ones, and vice versa, but with longer, drier fire seasons, they’re starting to overlap.

  2. While what you say is true unfortunately the deforestation in these 3rd world countries is at the behest of 1st world nations

  3. That’s pretty impressive, I used to live in the country on 16 acres, and I’m pretty sure I only planted a few hundred trees. Even if I’d turned my acreage into a tree farm, (I gave consideration to it.) I’d only been up to a few thousand. Given the amount of space a full grown tree needs, where did your dad find the room to plant a million trees?

    Or maybe innumeracy runs in families?

  4. Like our situation in California, arson isn’t the reason there are fires, but it’s often a factor in exactly where and when they happen.

    As I said above, fires are a natural part of the ecosystem, many species can’t even propagate without them. The problem is actually fire prevention.

    You prevent fires for too long without doing controlled burns or removing the fuel, and so much fuel accumulates that when your prevention fails, (As it inevitably will eventually.) you get an unnaturally large and intense fire.

    You can’t prevent fires in the ecosystems where they naturally happen. You can only manage them.

  5. Read DrPat. Throw in a bit of cognitive dissonance from the left. Who would have thought the Prez loves trees and 4th gen nuclear? He is supposed to be evil bad.

  6. lol. Are you a mind reader? I’m literally a tree hugger. Have replanted somewheres about 40,000 trees on my farm. By hand. What have you done lately for our planet?

  7. It can be an $X/tonne CO2 of negative impact problem without being an existential problem and still never high enough in $/tonne to build more than a handful of nuclear power plants.

  8. Dunno – if US replanted back to 1700’s levels, we’d add 300M acres. Maybe 200B trees if planted REALLY densely (every 8′), but I suspect the benefits tail off pretty fast after 1 every 25′, at least as the trees mature. But seems unlikely we’d plant 300M acres…

  9. As I’ve said before, the issue is finding spare land with enough water.

    And the solution is mangrove trees, especially if genetically engineered to grow faster and in deeper water.

  10. That’s a Murdoch paper, ie a cousin of Fox News. Find me that story somewhere trustworthy.

    A standard statement in the worldwide scientific community is that reality has a liberal bias. But I wouldn’t expect a conservative to know what the worldwide scientific community thinks.

  11. I just have rabbits and turkeys that come in and eat all the weeds for me.

    Of course they eat everything else too.

  12. I’m not sure which design you are referring to, but in 1949 they weren’t able to make a nuclear powered battleship, but they knew it would be available in the future, so at that point they couldn’t make a “perfect” battleship.

  13. If you heard that “environmentalists” run Australia, and are in charge of its fire fighting strategy, you are out of touch with reality. The last several governments were all right wing and have managed things from that perspective.

  14. If you heard that Australia suffers from arsonists, then you’re getting propaganda, not news. There’s zero evidence.

  15. Yeah, try better deadwood management or precautionary burns. You suppress fires for too long without removing deadwood, and you get really bad fires. Especially if you’ve got arsonists, I hear.

    Fires are a part of nature. You have to either remove the fuel, or have the fires, there are no other choices. Whacked out ‘environmentalists’ who don’t actually understand ecology don’t like either option, and so set the stage for really bad fires.

  16. A trillion trees doesn’t sound like a lot to me. I’m a city boy and I’ve planted thousands of trees. My dad told me that he had planted over a million trees and timber wasn’t his main business. The biggest timberman in our small community has probably planted 20 million trees. There are tens of thousands of similar sized timbermen in the US.

  17. Actually, the idea that we should reset the world to back when there were no humans is farcical at best, insane at worst. Also, the idea that the world is getting “Browner” (leaving aside demographic shifts) in terms of plant life is a lie.

    See: https://youtu.be/S-nsU_DaIZE

    Not a good start for a multiple governmental sideshow.

  18. Trees is an central part in the ecosystem and look nice and can be felled and used for useful material down the line, plant more.
    And yes global warming is an issue, it will change weather patterns.

    However, I will kick this back hard, if global warming is an existential crisis the obvious solution is to spam build nuclear plants and brace the fallout.
    Problem solved. Now start to optimize.

    No its not an perfect solution. Some waited until 1949 to design the perfect battleship. Hint it was not build 🙂

  19. If this ends up happening, I fully expect the enviro-socialists to start moving the goal post in the coming years. They don’t want solutions they want power.

  20. This isn’t about deforestation or needing trees, it’s about planting a trillion trees to absorb co2 in lieu of stopping the use of fossil fuels.

  21. It would be nice if they could succeed with that project to bring back the American chestnut tree. That was a rather vital food source for wildlife before the chestnut blight took it out; Unlike oak, the chestnut mast was every year. Wildlife could depend on it.

    I hear they think they now have a successful blight resistant strain, and are starting the rollout. It should be a significant fraction of the trees planted in North America.

  22. Sure thing (and I have dozens of apple/plum/pear/cherry and other fruit trees). And we don’t need “trees”, as grasslands are even better at sinking CO2 than trees. But a trillion is a really big number, it’a a LOT of apple cider and pies. I read the “trillion tree” thingy as “lots of green stuff everywhere” and not in it’s literal sense.

  23. You do know that there are trees that have fruits on them like apples, pears, mangoes, etc. And all trees including fruit trees can absorb CO2.

  24. That’s the mantra of scouting or any serious lover of nature (including your derisive term liberal tree hugger): Leave it like you found it. No excuses.

  25. Well, the US has lots of action outside it’s borders. We don’t need trees, but others do and there is a give and take with that involved. Call it “arboreal mercantilism”.

  26. Interesting, eh? Another example of a climate change denying entity making an end-run to mitigate the problem, without ever admitting it. It’s like those court cases were the defendant is ordered to pay for damages but doesn’t publicly have to admit any guilt or wrongdoing.

  27. correct. it’s the President’s prerogative. if it requires funding above budget Congress will need to get involved. But the Congresscritters already gave him approval for an omnibus…..the same people trying to impeach him have handed him a blank check to draw on a much bigger bank account.

  28. I’m not sure what this implies in the way of US action; The US has already been reforesting.

    Deforestation is a third world issue, not 1st world.

  29. Yep. Importing poor people who have low carbon footprints in underdeveloped countries to advanced wealthy countries where their per capita resource and energy use will double, triple or quadruple is obviously ecocide for the planet. True environmentalists should therefore oppose all mass migration.

  30. They should plant trees that maximize the food value for wildlife and value to people instead of trying to just plant local varieties. This would mean less land needed, best value for the trees that are planted and less expertise to match trees to environment, lowering cost. White oak and other nut trees, fruit trees and bushes etc. would feed a ton of wildlife, are hardy and also grow very large soaking up carbon dioxide. They are also useful as lumber for people. This is what I am already doing on my property.

    As a conservationist (not a tree hugging liberal) it is important for me to leave as good or better for future generations than what we received, but I want to do it as efficiently as possible. I do not want to have any part of the “death of life” species extinctions if I can help it. We are the stewards of this earth, not the owners.

  31. net-net, tree cover has increased on the planet compared to 50 years ago. That is the good news. A trillion trees will add 33% to existing stock, which is “growing on it’s own” about 10% over 35 years. So instead of waiting 100+ more years, the re-planting rate needs to be turbocharged to meet the 1 trillion goal. Each tree costs roughly $3 to plant (seeding+labor+logistics etc). Then you’ve got to find the right land, which is the really, really tricky part (and of course the right trees). Basically, where forests can grow, there are already forests. Where you need trees to replace forests lost to cropland, firewood, lumber, is in the tropics. This means to meet the “trillion tree” goal, gazillion farmers in these regions “need” to be told not to farm (and their cassava replaced by Big Macs?) , modern electricity and other items need to replace firewood, and fast-growth lumber needs to be replaced with…..?

    In other words, 1 trillion trees has a nice ring to it but basically means wholesale changes in how folks in the tropics live, their incomes, and standards of living. And somehow, America and others will pay for this? Don’t hold your breath. Virtue signaling.

  32. Secure the borders, and greatly reduce legal immigration. You can’t protect the environment as long as the population grows by millions a year.

  33. A robotic weeder could be incorporated in a robotic lawn mower. A bit of AI and some kind of manipulator, and hep, your done..

  34. Robotic fence repair and home painters would improve my area a bit more, but I wouldn’t say no to a robotic weeder in my back yard.

  35. You will pay a world wide income tax to cover the cost of climate change and like it. Trust us we will spend the money wisely.
    signed TPTB

  36. I hope that this involves robotic tree planters. Imagine what our cities could begin to look like if ornamental plant growing, planting, and care was done 24/7 by robotic gardeners!

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