Study: New trees key to fighting climate change - Rutland Herald

Study: New trees key to fighting climate change | 211 | rutlandherald.com

Christine Cramer watched the Winooski River rage during the catastrophic flooding in Vermont last month. She manages a conservation tree nursery at the Intervale Center in Burlington, and said she was struck when she saw how the trees planted along the riparian buffer zone slowed the surge and prevented the worst of the flooding.

“It was just a really powerful moment because you could see the service that these trees provide us, and without that buffer, the river could have easily taken away our greenhouses or some of the buildings,” said Cramer.

“It also just made me feel really good about the work that we’re doing, trying to restore these riparian areas and wetland areas to allow places for water to go during these heavy rain events,” she said.

As Vermonters are working to recover from the flooding, Cramer’s experience demonstrates one way the state can prepare for future disasters: planting trees. Reforestation efforts have the power to mitigate the effects of climate change in myriad ways, according to research, including preventing flooding and runoff, sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and making ecosystems more resilient.

Players on the national and global level are taking interest in planting trees as a means of fighting climate change.

A new goal of planting 1 trillion trees by 2030 was recently set by the World Economic Forum. As a part of the REPLANT Act in 2021, the U.S. government allocated $30 million toward tree nursery expansion with the goal of planting more than 1 billion trees and creating nearly 50,000 jobs in the next 10 years.

“Now, it sounds like a lot of money, and it’s a huge step forward, but it’s really just a drop in the bucket as it’s spread across all forest nurseries,” said Peter Clark, a postdoctoral associate and applied forest ecologist at the University of Vermont.

A team led by Clark and fellow UVM researcher Tony D’Amato recently released research on tree-planting efforts in parts of the northern United States, finding that seedling collection shortages at tree nurseries will be a roadblock for national and global reforestation efforts.

“In the Northeast, we currently are planting and producing generally low stocks,” said Chris Zimmerman, a restoration ecologist at the Nature Conservancy in New York and a co-author on the research. “We really need to ramp up seedling production within both private and public nurseries.”

A major reason for that problem is a declining workforce.

“Every nursery that I spoke to for this research I would ask anecdotally, ‘What are the broad challenges that are facing you?’ And without hesitation the majority of them said that finding folks to go out and actually collect seed was their biggest barrier,” said Clark. “It’s really a supply chain that’s become increasingly complicated.”

Clark’s research team was composed of scientists and natural resource managers across the northern states. They aimed to come up with solutions to address those barriers to reforestation goals.

“Given the immediacy of climate change and the needs to restore and shape ecological resilience, bringing in this broad, diverse audience and their voices into the room really help shape the research and make it a bit more actionable,” Clark said.

Remedies to limited seed production and planting issues discussed in the research included prioritizing workforce development, finding sources of funding, monitoring current and future tree-planting efforts and advocating for policy supporting reforestation on the state and national levels.

Zimmerman points to his home state for an example of reforestation legislative action. In December 2022, the New York State Climate Action Council passed a plan offering frameworks to reach zero-carbon emissions and ensure an equitable shift to renewable energy usage. One of the strategies included was reforestation.

“We identified tree planting, restoring forest cover, reforestation as a top strategy to be able to increase the rate of forest carbon sequestration and see it as really critical towards meeting New York state’s climate goals,” said Zimmerman.

The Vermont state tree nursery closed decades ago, so reforestation efforts in the state are limited to the local level, according to Clark.

But Cramer, from the Intervale Center, said she believes small-scale, collaborative tree nurseries can be more effective than some think.

“The Intervale conservation nursery started as a response to not having a state tree nursery, and so, in some ways, we feel like we fill a little bit of that role,” said Cramer. “I like seeing more of the grass roots, small nurseries pop up and try to support them as best as we can so that we can all achieve the same goal together.”

Clark said he is particularly concerned with promoting seed diversity along with increasing tree production generally. It is better to plant seeds that are adapted to the local climate, so some tree nurseries may have to start planting seeds from warmer places as climate change causes temperatures to rise.

“There’s a bit of uncertainty as to what sort of climate scenario we are planting for, so having a suite of genetic types to be able to select from and plant with is really the kind of broader global change argument for diversifying genotypes,” said Clark.

However, scarce seed stock and the limited capacity of smaller nurseries in Vermont make this type of planning difficult.

Brooke Fleischman, the seed coordinator at the Intervale Center, said the current focus of the conservation tree nursery is growing trees for riparian buffers.

“I think the main goal in the coming year or two is just to be able to provide enough seed and plant materials for projects, and then once we get to that point of filling those gaps is where we can start thinking about how to adjust for a change in climate,” Fleischman said.

Forest nurseries, said Clark, have played a tremendous role in restoration and ecological integrity over the years.

“They’re currently facing a lot of challenges given the diverse mixed needs for planting for global change, so anything that we can do to call this to attention and to start thinking creatively about how we can support forest nurseries and expand that effort — I think it is certainly going to be an important first step,” he said.