“We will be planting the least number of trees that we have in the past 40 years, at a time when there is an absolutely massive need for investment in replanting,” Macdonald said.

At the moment the forests in B.C. have already suffered with one million destroyed by forest fires and an additional 15 million by pests (largely the mountain pine beetle). This year the government is planning to plant 190 million trees, which is down from 225 million in a typical harvesting year. The biggest planting year in B.C. was in 1989 when a further 300 million trees were planted. Next year the number of trees planted is expected to decline further to 175 million.

According to Bell the majority of the planting is as part of reforestation obligations by logging companies harvesting Crown land. At the moment there is a two year lag between logging and replanting so the current planting decline reflects the downturn in the industry set off by the collapse of the US housing construction market.

The government’s pine beetle and fire reclamation programme has a budget of $42 million this year, with $400 million allocated over the next five years. So far 20 million trees have been planted this year. Bell this programme, called Forests for Tomorrow a ‘good, solid programme’.

To bring attention to the issue the Western Silviculture Contractors Association has launched a website at www.forestfacts.ca. In 2008 the association says that there were 6,000 tree planters working in B.C. and Alberta this year that number fell to 4,000 despite the widespread fires and beetle epidemic.

Unfortunately Bell said that the solution to the pine beetle epidemic wasn’t as simple as just replanting the affected areas.

“What we’re finding is stands that were killed 10 or 15 years ago have developed a relatively large understory, and that understory offers greater potential for the mid-term timber supply than going in, taking down the dead pine that’s left, damaging the understory that was in place prior to that, and replanting,” Bell said.

“The chief forester’s office has done a lot of work on this, and we analyze each stand individually before making a decision on whether to allow the stand to remain and the understory to survive, or knocking it down and replanting. And that’s what the Forests for Tomorrow program are all about.” He concluded.

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IU was one of 74 schools that earned Tree Campus USA recognition in 2009. The Arbor Day Foundation began Tree Campus USA in the fall of 2008 to recognize colleges and universities that practice sound campus forestry. The aim of the program is to honor college campuses and the leaders of surrounding communities for promoting healthy urban forest management and engaging the campus community in environmental stewardship.

Since its inception, Tree Campus USA has been supported by $1.3 million in grants from Toyota.

The impact Tree Campus USA had more than doubled during its second year. In its inaugural year, 29 colleges and universities received Tree Campus USA honors. To celebrate the success of the program, the Arbor Day Foundation and Toyota are holding tree-planting events on five college campuses this spring. In addition to Indiana University, Tree Campus USA tree-planting events will also be held at American University; the University of Pennsylvania; the University of Louisiana at Lafayette; and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

During the event, IU students and volunteers in the community planted more than 50 trees as part of the campus Arbor Day Celebration. Trees were planted near the DeVault Alumni Center, which is located near Memorial Stadium and Assembly Hall. The trees will help increase the campus’s tree canopy and will provide shade for students and visitors.

“We applaud Indiana University’s commitment to improving the urban forest on its campus, and for demonstrating to students why it is so important to plant trees,” said John Rosenow, chief executive and founder of the nonprofit Arbor Day Foundation. “By striving to follow best tree-care practices and encouraging students to plant trees on campus, Indiana University is helping the next generation learn first-hand the importance of giving back to the earth.”

In order to become a Tree Campus USA community, schools are required to meet five core standards of tree care and community engagement. Those standards are: Establishing a campus tree advisory committee; evidence of a campus tree-care plan; verification of dedicated annual expenditures on the campus tree plan; involvement in an Arbor Day observance; and the institution of a service-learning project aimed at engaging the student body.

“Today’s tree planting took place in an area that has been designated as the ‘Woodland Arboretum’ in the 2009 IU Bloomington Campus Master Plan, and initiates the implementation process of increasing the campus tree canopy cover from 20- to 40-percent over the lifetime of the plan which is estimated to be 10 years,” said Mia Williams, Indiana University landscape architect.

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America’s first ever auction of greenhouse gas emission allowances took place on September 25^th as part of a ten-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). It is hoped that regular C02 auctions will boost the forestry industry and attract developers of forestry projects to the States.

“Ten states, from Maryland to Maine, are already implementing their own regional cap and trade, undertaking the nation’s most serious effort yet to tackle climate change,” said US Congressman Lloyd Dogget earlier in the month. “And California has joined six other states and four Canadian provinces in a similar effort,” he added.

RGGI has been designed as a framework within which states are able to draft specific environmental regulations, according to Sarah Woodhouse Murdock, Boston-based eastern US region climate change programme manager for the Nature Conservancy.

Pre-compliance trading for the RGGI initiative started in February, and the compliance period will commence in January 2009. The next auction is scheduled for December 2008.

Undeniably the new initiative has experienced some teething problems, such as a widespread perception that too many allowances have been allocated. “It’s a repeat of EU ETS I (the first round of the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme), where governments gave away more allowances than there were emissions,” said one European developer of forestry projects.

Some states have also been slow to finalise their rules and regulations within the RGGI framework. Murdoch admits that many states were not ready to participate in September’s auction. However, Murdoch is positive about the outcome of the next auction: “Hopefully by December most all of the states will be ready to participate,” she said.

The RGGI initiative created five offset categories that would be recognised under the programme. The five categories are: afforestation (tree-planting), methane capture, capture of emissions from transmission lines, agriculture waste digestion and green building initiatives that result in more efficient use of natural gas.

The afforestation rule includes baseline requirements along with specifications for permanence, additional growth and other concerns. “Each state adopted that model rule,” Murdock says. “There was no flexibility in the offset provisions for the states. It was kind of an up or down for them. That made sure that each state’s rules on the offsets were consistent with each other.”

Forestry Update is sponsored by Greenwood Management. For more information on investing in Forestry please click here