Corporate Collaboration Drives Recovery From Historic Wildfires

Originally published on Sustainable Brands 

At the Arbor Day Foundation, we are working with some of the world’s largest and most well-known companies to lead this important work. With the launch of our Wildfire Restoration Collaborative, eight of our corporate partners — AT&T, Facebook, FedEx, HP, Mary Kay, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble and Target — committed to help the Foundation drive awareness and action around wildfire recovery. With an initial focus on California, these partners are replanting 8,000 acres in the burn scars of the 2018 Carr and Camp Fires. Future projects are slated for Australia and Canada, as well as other affected forests across the US.

These corporate leaders offer more than just financial support. Wildfire restoration is a long-term process — with damage assessment, seedling grow-outs, and of course tree planting — requiring a commitment of several years. Even once seedlings are in the ground, our local planting partners must continue to monitor and manage the forests to promote healthy regeneration.

It would be easy to put such a long-term project on the back burner, but major brands can help remind their peers, consumers and employees that restoration work is important and deserves our attention. For example, Procter & Gamble’s Family Care products — Bounty, Charmin and Puffs — were the first brands to sign on to the Wildfire Restoration Collaborative with a commitment to plant 300,000 trees in California. This initiative opened the door for other leading companies to sign on, and demonstrated the urgency of wildfire recovery to millions of consumers who purchase the brands’ goods each day.