A Forest Recovery System Is So Much More than Just Tree Planting

By Jess Kaknevicius

It’s clear that forests across Canada are under increasing and compounding stresses.

Two of the last three years were the worst on record for cumulative area burned by wildfires. The amount of forest biomass threatened by invasive insects in Canada is projected to more than quadruple over the next two decades as warming temperatures expand their range. Meanwhile, climate change is shifting species’ natural ranges, while extreme weather is disrupting regeneration windows and making seed collection and seedling survival increasingly unpredictable.

Now, more than $135 billion in major resource and infrastructure projects, including pipelines, critical minerals mines, highways and ports, are being fast-tracked to grow our economy, connect the country and create jobs, with certain direct and indirect impacts on forests.

It is also clear that restoring healthy forest ecosystems is one of the most impactful and effective tools we have to adapt to and mitigate climate change, recover biodiversity, and build community resilience.

Increasingly, alongside the more familiar objectives of habitat creation, air purification and recreation, I find myself in conversations around how we can restore forests at landscape and watershed scales to deliver outcomes such as flood mitigation, drought resilience, bank and slope stabilization, coastal erosion prevention, reduced wildfire risk to communities, and support Indigenous stewardship and land-based cultural revitalization.

This growing recognition of the connections between human health and well-being and forest health reflects a fundamental truth, long understood by Indigenous Peoples: we have always depended on forests, even if we haven’t always fully recognized the extent of that dependence. As the consequences of overlooking this dependence become harder to ignore, so too does the importance of maintaining healthy, resilient forests. And yet, at a time when forests are under greater stress than ever, we are increasingly relying on them to deliver more for us, both now and for generations to come.

If we are to ask even more of restored forests, we a need to look beyond planting trees and toward building a forest recovery system capable of delivering projects that can meet these increasingly complex and high-stakes objectives, at the scale and pace they will be needed.

Behind every tree is a much larger system that is as multifaceted as a forest itself: lived and learned knowledge, seed collection and storage, seedling production, trained workers and contractors, equipment, logistics, infrastructure, planning, technical expertise, training and education, research, funding, policy, relationships, monitoring and reporting, and the organizations and communities that bring all of those pieces together.

Canada has made significant investments in forest recovery in recent years. Initiatives such as the Government of Canada’s 2 Billion Trees Program have helped to not just plant trees, but to restore critical habitat, expand nursery capacity, develop technical skills, deepen our scientific understanding, and strengthen knowledge sharing between organizations across the country.

But the question at this moment is not just how to or how much capacity we need to build and where, it is also how we can maintain and build on the existing capacity and momentum that has been built over the last five years.

Will we leverage today’s capacity to build robust systems for the future of our forests? Or will we lose it?

A system that can shift-down without shutting down

A resilient forest recovery system needs to be able to ramp up when it needs to and scale back when it does not. But scaling back is not the same thing as shutting down.

There is a point at which reduced activity begins to erode the foundations that make future responses possible. If nurseries cannot maintain production, contractors leave the sector, experienced workers move into other industries, seed supply chains weaken, equipment is sold and organizational knowledge is lost, the system may still technically exist, but our ability to scale up forest recovery may be diminished beyond the point of rapid and low-effort return.

Rebuilding relationships, networks, institutional knowledge and so many other aspects of a robust forest recovery system are not as simple as turning the funding back on or hacking the process with new technology.

Seed collection and nursery production require planning horizons that extend well beyond a single funding cycle. Workforce capacity takes time to develop. Relationships, trust, and expertise have been built over years. Infrastructure and equipment are significant capital investments that operators need a level of certainty on payback to justify.

That means there is a threshold we need to understand:

• What is the minimum level of activity required to keep the forest recovery system functioning?
• Where is the line between a system that has temporarily slowed down and one that has lost critical capacity?
• And how do we make sure we do not cross that line?

From reactive to ready

Readiness is not about maintaining maximum capacity at all times or predicting exactly what forest recovery in Canada will look like 10, 20 or 30 years from now.

It means preparing now: building an adaptable system that can respond as needs emerge without compromising the standards, resources, or investment available for recovery already underway or needed elsewhere.

Achieving this will require a more coordinated view of the forest recovery system as a whole.

And that may mean we need to rethink business models, update policies, develop new approaches, redefine measures of success and find new ways of demonstrating and communicating the environmental, social and economic value of forest recovery. It means engaging new partners, such as utilities, insurance providers, and financial institutions.

It will require us to look beyond individual programs, organizations, and regions to understand how different pieces of the system depend on one another. The challenges around funding certainty, workforce development, seed and nursery supply, long-term monitoring and stewardship, and evolving business models cannot be solved by any one organization or region alone.

The most urgent task is to start these conversations before existing capacity is lost, rather than waiting until we urgently need to rebuild it.

This is why we are bringing the forest recovery community together this fall for the Forest Recovery Summit.

The Summit is an opportunity to step beyond individual programs and projects and look at the bigger picture: What does a ready and resilient forest recovery system look like? Where are the gaps? What can we build together? And what kinds of partnerships, investment and coordination will be needed to sustain the system over the long term?

Conversations happening across the country already point to the need for a more coordinated national approach. The next step is bringing more of those perspectives into the same room.

There is still time to register your interest in joining us at the Forest Recovery Summit. If you are part of the system or help shape the conditions in which forest recovery happens, we would like you to participate. We hope to see you in November.