Forests managed by Indigenous nations face a $100 million funding gap
Forests managed by Indigenous nations are severely underfunded. To reach per-acre parity with forests managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, the federal government would need to increase funding by nearly $ 96 million every year. That’s according to a new report from the Intertribal Timber Council, a nonprofit consortium consisting primarily of tribes and Alaska Native Corporations.
In 2019, the base year for the study, tribal forests represented nearly 19 million acres in the United States, including approximately 10.2 million acres of commercial forests and woodlands. A total of 345 tribal forests are managed across the nation, with 316 of those forests being held in federal trust.
“It seems like a fairly straightforward answer that when we look at the disparity in funding between other federal agencies and tribes, that [Congress] would just increase …