Interview: Could climate change soon impact Christmas trees?

This interview aired on Dec. 17, 2025, and has been edited for clarity.

It may not be obvious this holiday season, but climate change is seriously impacting Christmas trees, experts say.

NewsChannel 9 spoke with Cornell professor, Trent Preszler, author of Evergreen: The Trees That Shaped America, about the history and future of the familiar firs.

Let’s put it into perspective, just how resilient evergreens have been over the course of millions and millions of years.

Oh, sure. They’re some of the most resilient organisms on earth, and the ancestors of our modern Christmas trees were these top-heavy Christmas trees called Archaeopteris. They lived about 385 million years ago. They dominated the earth’s surface during the time with the dinosaurs, and they evolved to survive volcanic winters, ice ages, glaciers, and infernos. They’re incredibly resilient; they can grow in extreme hot and extreme cold climates on the side of a rock cliff face.

Fast forward to today, now we’re seeing climate change starting to have an impact on these evergreens, which seem to have been resilient to just about everything over the history of the planet.

We are. We’re seeing really dramatic changes, especially at the farm gate levels. So with small Christmas tree growers, both in the Pacific Northwest and here in New York State as well. There were a couple of heat domes and long, extended periods of drought, especially in the Pacific Northwest, that killed millions of seedlings.

So it may not necessarily be obviously noticeable now, I guess. When could we really start to see the impact of climate change on the evergreens and the Christmas trees?

The remarkable thing about it is that these trees are grown on farms, and they take 8-10 years to mature. So the heat dome that happened a couple of years ago, we won’t really see that impact in the marketplace until maybe another six years, when those trees that died would’ve been old enough to cut down and sell as a real Christmas tree. But a lot of these changes are happening on a time scale that the trees can’t really adapt to. So we’re having extended periods of heat and drought in the summer. We’re also having milder winters, and so a lot of the disease organisms would normally be kept in check over a really cold winter — organisms like a pine bark beetle, or a fungus. In a mild winter, they survive in greater numbers, and then they emerge in the spring more able to attack the Christmas trees, and [the Christmas trees’] defenses are not as able to withstand.

Alright, I gotcha. So are we starting to see an impact on prices already, or will we see that when the supply gets really impacted by a lack of these firs in the market?

That’s an interesting question because no, we haven’t seen a spike in prices, and for the most part, Christmas tree farmers are price takers. Which means they don’t really have that much control over their price. The price for real Christmas trees is determined largely by the major big box retailers, places like Home Depot and Lowe’s, that sell the most amount of Christmas trees. These farmers, because they’re not able to capture more revenue, and they have a restricted supply because more of their trees died when they were young, they’re seeing a shrinking revenue base as well.

Is there anything that growers can do at this point to try to keep up? Do you try to plant a different kind of fir? I would say a more resilient kind, but how much more resilient could they be? But what do you do if you’re a grower?

I recently spoke to a grower just north of Ithaca who had been growing Douglas fir trees for 40 years; in fact, he named his son Douglas. So for 40 years, he could grow the Douglas firs, but they have become weakened by this fungal pathogen called needle cast disease. Now, basically, he can’t grow firs anymore. So, you can switch to different varieties; you can spray; you can irrigate. But most of these trees are grown on farms that don’t necessarily have irrigation, and the farms are already stretched so tight with their profit margins that they can’t really afford to use a lot more imports, like pesticides, fertilizers, or irrigation.

Interesting. Well, Trent, I appreciate you sharing. Even if there’s a perfect solution right now, I think it’s worthy of all of us knowing and learning that this is happening; they’re kind of on the front lines there. I appreciate you joining us. I think we’ll have to check back in with you again because this clearly is a longer discussion. Thank you for being here.

Absolutely, my pleasure.

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