Reprinted from the Texas Forest Service website
by Pete Smith
Staff Forester III
Texas Forest Service
(Houston)—$205 billion. That’s billion with a “b.” That is what it would cost to replace all the trees within the eight-county region around Houston, according to a new Texas Forest Service report.
Beyond the sheer landscape value of trees, the report—Houston’s Regional Forest: Structure • Functions • Values—also documents the contributions trees make in air pollution removal, carbon sequestration, and residential energy savings. Combined, these three functions of trees provide $456 million in annual benefits to the region’s citizens.
“Trees work hard for us,” said Jim Hull, state forester and director of Texas Forest Service, who announced the findings at a news conference in Houston in October. “We’ve looked to trees and forests for wood products for hundreds of years, but we’re just beginning to understand how to put a dollar value on all the other things trees do for us, especially in urban areas,” said Hull.
The report also documents the loss of the region’s forests to changes in land use. “Our study shows that land classified as forest declined by 17 percent between 1992 and 2000,” said Mickey Merritt, Houston regional urban forester for Texas Forest Service.
“As people build new homes and businesses in suburban and rural areas, we’re turning our traditional forests into ‘urban’ forests,” according to Merritt. “So if we want the benefits of trees for our kids and grandkids, we need to set up new tree programs and policies today.”
Houston’s Regional Forest is the first-of-its-kind look at the functions and values of trees across the Houston metropolitan area—the same area designated by EPA as being in violation of the Clean Air Act for ground-level ozone.
“Trees in the Houston region may be part of the solution to vexing problems like regional air pollution, since they remove over 60,000 tons of air pollutants annually,” according to the principal investigator on the study, Dr. David Nowak, of the U.S. Forest Service’s Northeastern Research Station in Syracuse, NY.
“The value of that one function is worth almost $300 million each year to the citizens of the region,” said Nowak.
To obtain a copy of the report, contact Texas Forest Service at (713) 688-8931 or (979) 458-6650.