Funding Announced For Trump’s Forest Plan
Putting their money where their mouth is, the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) announced in late May a $200 million investment to implement the Forest Service National Active Management Strategy to increase timber harvest, improve forest health and productivity, reduce wildfire risk, and support rural economics in forest communities.
The announcement came from U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who had issued in April an “emergency situation” memo pertaining to the more than 112 million acres of national forest land. These developments are in support of President Trump’s Executive Order earlier in the year, calling for “Immediate Expansion of Timber Production.”
The new strategy intends to streamline burdensome regulations and expedite project approvals, ensuring faster access to critical timber resources.
The Forest Service has committed to increasing timber harvest on national forests by 25%, with an overall goal of 4 billion BF harvested annually by fiscal year 2028.
One of the strategic focus areas is streamlining environmental compliance and regulatory processes, such as accelerating National Environmental Policy Act reviews; another focus is salvage and reforestation and immediate large-scale salvage execution as disturbances happen.
A priority of the strategy is for the Forest Service to provide greater certainly for industry to make investments, such as through 10+ year longer-term conventional timber contracts.
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Purdue Grant Focuses On Forest Development
U.S. Dept. of Agriculture has awarded a $10 million grant to Purdue University to help landowners and stakeholders better adapt their forests to increasingly complicated economic and climate conditions in the Eastern U.S. About 5 million small, private landowners control just over half the acreage of forests in the Eastern U.S. This contrasts with Western U.S. forests, which are mostly publicly owned. Purdue and its project partners—the University of Georgia, the University of Maine and the U.S. Forest Service—aim to improve the management of 15 million acres of those forests, an area nearly as large as…
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