---
title: "California can't replant its burned forests fast enough to keep up with the fires"
description: "Over 25 years, 2.3 million acres of California forest have burned so severely that trees are unlikely to return on their own. Since 2020, only about 16 percent of that land has been replanted, and just 8 percent on federal land. The state lacks the seeds, the nurseries and the workers to catch up, and by 2071 half its forest could be gone."
category: "California"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/california
author: "Brandon Cole"
published: 2026-07-24T13:48:00.000Z
updated: 2026-07-24T13:48:00.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/california-cant-replant-its-burned-forests-fast-enough-to-keep-up-with-the-fires
tags: ["wildfires", "forests", "reforestation", "cal-fire", "california"]
---
# California can't replant its burned forests fast enough to keep up with the fires

Over 25 years, 2.3 million acres of California forest have burned so severely that trees are unlikely to return on their own. Since 2020, only about 16 percent of that land has been replanted, and just 8 percent on federal land. The state lacks the seeds, the nurseries and the workers to catch up, and by 2071 half its forest could be gone.

California is losing its forests faster than it can grow them back, [CalMatters reports](https://calmatters.org/environment/wildfires/2026/07/wildfires-california-forest-reforestation-seed/), and the gap is not close.

## The scale of the problem

Over the past 25 years, about 2.3 million acres of California forestland has burned severely enough that the trees are unlikely to come back naturally. Replanting is the only way those forests return, and replanting is badly behind. Since 2020, only around 254,000 acres, roughly 16 percent of the high-severity burn areas, have been replanted statewide. On federal land, the figure is just 8 percent.

The trajectory that implies is stark. By 2071, according to the reporting, half of California's forest area could disappear. "We are slowly losing our forestland, and we're not catching up," said Stewart McMorrow, Cal Fire's wildfire resilience staff chief.

## Why it is so hard to catch up

The bottleneck is not will but infrastructure, and it starts with seeds. Cal Fire's Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis stores about 42,000 pounds of tree seed. To replant even a quarter of the state's privately owned forestland, Cal Fire estimates California would need to increase that seed capacity by roughly 300 percent.

Then there is cost and labor. Reforestation runs up to $6,400 an acre, and meeting the state's own goals would mean scaling up about 35 percent a year, reaching 280,000 acres planted annually by 2030. That requires nurseries, seed collectors and planting crews the state does not currently have at scale.

The workforce problem is getting worse, not better, largely at the federal level, which manages much of California's forest. Non-fire Forest Service staffing fell 39 percent between 1998 and 2015, and the Trump administration cut Forest Service staff by another 20 percent last year. "Capacity already was really minimal," said Hugh Safford, a UC Davis forest ecologist, of what those cuts leave behind.

## The loop that makes it worse

Underneath the numbers is a self-reinforcing problem worth naming. More than a century of aggressive fire suppression left California's forests overgrown and primed to burn hot, and climate change has made them hotter and drier still. That produces the high-severity fires that kill forests outright rather than the lower-intensity burns many species evolved with. So the fires that create the need for replanting are also getting worse, which means the target keeps moving even as the state falls behind on hitting it.

## What has worked, and the size of the task

It is not all failure, and the reporting is fair about that. A federal reforestation trust fund created in 2021 produced 285,000 acres replanted nationally in a single year, the highest yearly total in more than 25 years. The tools exist and can work when funded.

But one strong national year against 2.3 million severely burned California acres is the whole story in miniature: real progress, dwarfed by the scale of what is needed. Reforestation is slow, expensive and unglamorous, the opposite of the dramatic firefight, and it is exactly the part of wildfire recovery most likely to be underfunded. The Herald will keep reporting whether California treats replanting as the emergency its own foresters say it is, because on current numbers the forests are not waiting.

## Sources

- [California can't replant its forests fast enough to keep up with wildfires](https://calmatters.org/environment/wildfires/2026/07/wildfires-california-forest-reforestation-seed/)