More than 1.1 billlon trees have been planted in British Columbia since 2018, the provincial government said Wednesday.
Roly Russell, Parliamentary Secretary for Rural Development, acknowledged the often back-breaking effort it took for B.C.'s silviculture sector to reach the milestone.
"Kudos to all those who put the shovels in the ground and managed to grow all those trees to get us to a billion trees," he said in an interview.
Broken down, just over 301 million were planted in 2021, a record 304 million in 2020, 258 million in 2019 and 255 million in 2018.
They comprised a mix of native tree species, including lodgepole pine, interior spruce, western red cedar, Douglas fir and Larch.
The goal for 2022 is 265 million - with 247 of them in the Interior and 18 million on the Coast.
About 5,000 tree planters will be involved in the effort while another 1,300 workers are currently preparing millions of seedlings for cold storage, where they'll wait until spring to be shipped to planting sites around B.C.
Russell said the goal is to get the areas that have been logged back to the point of being "healthy, regenerated forests."
"We want to make sure, for all sorts of reasons - for future employment, for ecological value and for the carbon cycle equation - that those forests are not being deforested. It's returning them to forests, that's a commitment that harvesting comes with when it takes place in B.C."
In terms of carbon sequestration, one million trees planted today can have the greenhouse gas benefit of removing 42,000 cars from the road for a year once they have grown, according to the provincial government.
Annual tree-planting efforts in B.C. start on the coast in early February, then expand throughout the Interior and Northern regions by the second week of July.
Fall planting makes up a small portion of the annual reforestation effort but takes place in September and October in some parts of the province.
