Flush with new funding, forestry leaders try to figure out how to turn it into more trees across 130 million acres

Conifers at the Montana Conservation Seedling Nursery. (Alex Brown/Stateline)

A pair of federal infrastructure and climate bills, signed by President Biden less than a year apart, have provided foresters, nursery managers and urban planners with billions in federal funding and a mandate to reforest millions of acres, reports Alex Brown for Stateline. Suddenly flush with funds but low on manpower and seeds, tree-growers are trying to figure out what to do with the money.

Over 130 million acres in the U.S. have the potential to be reforested, research by nonprofits American Forests and The Nature Conservancy found, but "even getting halfway to that target by 2040 would require 3 billion seedlings a year — far more than the 1.3 billion grown today," Brown writes.

Federal agencies are starting to release plans to allocate funding from last November's bipartisan infrastructure law. It has $200 million for a national revegetation effort, "much of it on federal lands but including $60 million for state and private forestry." Another $1 billion will pay for forest health projects while another $11 billion will go toward restoring abandoned mine lands. That money also doesn't include the $1.5 billion earmarked for green infrastructure in urban and underserved communities by way of the Inflation Reduction Act passed in August. 

“The Forest Service is trying to push money out to states, and our partners are saying, ‘Hold on a sec, we have to get more people in place so we can accept this money’,” said Kasten Dumroese, a national nursery specialist and research plant physiologist with the service. Many programs for distributing the forest money are still being developed and the staffing problem affecting all parts of the economy will need to be addressed in order to put the money to work, Brown reports.