On the occasion of the “One forest Summit”, organized in Libreville by France and Gabon from Wednesday, franceinfo is interested in the state of health of the French forest, and in particular in the announcement of Emmanuel Macron on the planting of a billion trees over ten years after the monster fires of the summer of 2022.
The goal is ambitious. When presenting a plan to fight forest fires on October 28, 2022, the President of the Republic promised “Planting a Billion Trees” on French territory “within ten years” evoking “a formidable ecological project and development of our territory”. But France lacks seeds and personnel to achieve this objective.
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At La Joux in the Jura, a large shed serves as a seed granary for the National Forestry Office (ONF). Inside, wooden crates contain thousands of tree seeds from more than 80 different species. A place called a “drying”. The seeds can be worth 1,500 euros per kilo. Some of them are kept in a cold room. “In a cold room of oak trees like this, there are 100,000 liters of acorns storedexplains Joël Conche, national seed and seedling expert at the ONF. We are capable of producing five million plants in the nursery, the equivalent of 3,850 football pitches.”
“We have to postpone the productions”
These seeds are the future of the French forest. They are harvested from orchards. They are mainly purchased by nurserymen who grow the trees before planting, but “we can talk about a shortage of seeds”according to professionals. “The consequence is that we have to postpone productions because we don’t have the seedsexplains Gilles Bauchery, president of the National Union of Forest Nurserymen. It is true that this is the most pressing problem at the moment.”
“We have a lot of difficulty finding all the seeds that we use to produce our plants. This is one of the major challenges for the production of forest plants.”
Gilles Bauchery, President of the National Union of Forest Nurserymenat franceinfo
This lack of seed concerns sessile oaks and conifers. Gilles Bauchery explains that it is complicated to import them. Other European countries are also affected by this lack of raw materials.
The forest in bad condition
There are several explanations for this seed shortage. First, there is the aging of the seed orchards, that is to say the plots where the seeds are picked. They date from the 1970s and are no longer suitable for today’s climate.
Then there is global warming and invasive species. They are slowing down the renewal of forests. The failure rate of plantations today is on average 38%. “For example, we have new parasites that we did not currently know about in our seed orchards and which reduce yields by around 50%, for example.“, reports Joel Conche.
“You have to compensate by taking more quantity, but on the other hand, this clearly increases the cost of the product at the start.”
Joël Conche, national seed and plant expert at the ONFat franceinfo
A problem, because the forest is in poor condition. According to the High Council for the Climate, it is finding it increasingly difficult to play its role as a carbon sink. This is linked to the increase in samples, but also to the intensification of attacks on the climate and parasites, explains Morgane Goudet, project manager in the “Forest health” department of the Ministry of Agriculture: “Things are accelerating, especially for the bio-aggressors that are introduced. And then, in terms of droughts and climatic problems, it’s the same. We have seen a lot more droughts in recent years, with an impact on plantations, on adult trees. So we can say that we have an acceleration of these two phenomena.”
“At the beginning of a new era”
It is not certain that Emmanuel Macron’s plan – a billion trees planted in ten years – can reverse the trend. There is a lack of seeds, but also of arms in the timber companies. We are still groping about what to replant so that the new species can hold up in 50 years in the face of global warming.
Today there are models for defining new planting sites and pilot plots. But everything is changing very quickly, says Catherine Bastien, head of the ecology and biodiversity of forest environments department at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (Inrae): “We started to experiment, we learned to observe. But what is new today is to look at the functioning of these trees when there is a combination of these hazards. I would say that we are at the beginning of a new era.”
In France, there are 139 species of trees. To support the plantation, the government has already put 200 million on the table. Private owners who manage two-thirds of the forest are waiting for new funds. To meet the president’s objective, it will be necessary to almost double the rate of planting, which is 60 million trees per year.