Restoring Trees to the Landscape: Creating “Shovel-Ready” Jobs across the United States

This briefing from the World Resources Institute argues that the United States can create significant employment and economic growth while advancing climate goals by investing in tree restoration. It proposes specific federal policy changes to fund reforestation on private, municipal, and state lands and critiques the Trillion Trees Act for potentially increasing emissions and causing a net loss of trees.

• An annual federal investment of $44.5 billion in tree restoration could create more than 150,000 jobs and generate $612 billion in annual economic activity. Over a 20-year period, this investment could restore up to 60 billion trees through methods such as reforestation, urban forestry, alley cropping, silvopasture, and restocking forests.
• Tree restoration offers substantial environmental and public health benefits, including the potential to remove up to 540 million tons of carbon dioxide per yearapproximately 10% of annual net U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, U.S. trees already provide $6.8 billion annually in health benefits by avoiding respiratory illness and mortality.
• The author proposes three federal policy actions to scale restoration on non-federal lands: adding dedicated funding to the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), expanding the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) to include unproductive grazing lands (which would require raising the acreage cap by up to 12 million acres), and issuing grants to state and local governments for urban and suburban reforestation.
• The Trillion Trees Act is criticized for potentially increasing greenhouse gas emissions and causing a net loss of trees. Specific concerns include the creation of a "National Reforestation Task Force" that might recommend increasing timber harvests on public lands, the relaxation of NEPA reviews for timber harvests, and the allocation of only $55 million per year in new reforestation funding.

APA

Rudee, A. (2020). Restoring Trees to the Landscape: Creating “Shovel-Ready” Jobs across the United States. World Resources Institute. https://files.wri.org/s3fs-public/expert-note-tree-restoration.pdf

Chicago

Rudee, Alex. Restoring Trees to the Landscape: Creating “Shovel-Ready” Jobs across the United States. World Resources Institute, 2020. https://files.wri.org/s3fs-public/expert-note-tree-restoration.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Rudee |first1=Alex |title=Restoring Trees to the Landscape: Creating “Shovel-Ready” Jobs across the United States |publisher=World Resources Institute |date=April 2020 |url=https://files.wri.org/s3fs-public/expert-note-tree-restoration.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{rudee2020restoring, author = {Rudee, Alex}, title = {{Restoring Trees to the Landscape: Creating “Shovel-Ready” Jobs across the United States}}, institution = {World Resources Institute}, year = {2020}, month = apr, url = {https://files.wri.org/s3fs-public/expert-note-tree-restoration.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }