Standing before dozens of people at SUNY Adirondack in November, State Forester Molly Hassett gave a brief review of historic reforestation efforts in New York before circling back to one of the more current initiatives—ensuring 25 million trees are planted in the state by 2033.
The initiative is one of several outlined in the scoping plan for New York’s Climate and Community Protection Act (Climate Act). The plan calls for New York to be carbon neutral by 2050 by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 85%. The remaining 15% of greenhouse gases would be captured and stored mainly by forests, which is why New York is looking to add more trees to the landscape.
So far, the state’s digital tree tracker has recorded about 361,000 trees being planted since the effort was announced in early 2024, but those numbers are expected to increase in the coming years as the state and its partners are laying the groundwork for the reforestation effort, a big part of which is the creation of a reforestation plan by the DEC.
In the meantime, the plantings are coming in spurts. Just recently, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that the New York Power Authority (NYPA), through its 2025 Tree Power program, is delivering 1,650 trees to 49 low-cost energy and energy efficiency customers in municipalities and state agencies throughout the state.
A draft of the reforestation plan is expected to be released in 2026, followed by a public comment period.
The goal of the reforestation plan is to create “a roadmap to achieve that statewide reforestation goal,” said Hassett, who is a supervising forester in the DEC’s climate forestry and carbon unit. She was speaking at a forestry roundtable hosted by the Adirondack Research Consortium and Empire State Forest Products Association at SUNY Adirondack in Queensbury.
The draft plan will include feedback from 200 natural resource professionals from 110 local and regional organizations and more than 13 state agencies, she said.
“A big concern was balancing reforestation and other types of land use,” Hassett said.
Other land uses include grasslands, agriculture, renewable energy, and housing.
The plan also outlines ways to scale up the reforestation supply chain, which includes increasing seed collection and reproduction, and building up the demand for reforestation by engaging communities, landowners and other interested parties.
The state is also supporting reforestation through grant programs and upgrading the state’s tree nursery in Saratoga County.
Opportunities for reforestation
The biggest opportunities for reforestation exist on agricultural lands that are no longer in use, according to a study done by The Nature Conservancy.
“There’s potentially about 1.6 million acres of these post-agricultural lands that are potentially available,” Hassett said.
She said “potentially” because whether these lands can be converted is dependent on the willingness of the landowners.
“You’d have to go to each of these sites and see if a landowner would be willing to convert those lands,” Hassett said.
There are about 173,831 acres of post-agricultural land in the North Country, much of it outside the Adirondack Park in places like Jefferson County.
New York has about 18.6 million acres of forest land, which makes up about 62% of the state. About 73%, or 13.7 million acres, are owned by private landowners. In the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park, about 80% of the land is forested.
New York forests hold an estimated 1,911 million metric tons of carbon, which is equivalent to the CO2 that would be produced to power all the houses in New York for the next 100 years, according to the Climate Act.
This isn’t the first time the state has undertaken a big reforestation effort. In the late 1800s, only about 25% of the land in the state was forested due to logging and conversion of the land to agriculture.
The 20th century saw the recovery of more than 9 million acres of forests through planting and preservation efforts.