World Environment Day 2024

KKL-JNF moves from massive planting to target-driven, sustainable management

Policy is ‘to ask not where we can plant, but if there is a reason to plant,’ says former official, as 103-year-old organization adapts to climate change, protects ecosystems

Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter

From left: Gilad Ostrovsky, chief forester and forestry department director at KKL-JNF, Chanan Zoref, recently retired director of the Judean Mountains District, and Shani Rohatyn-Blitz, the forestry department's coordinator of research and international relations, April 16, 2024. (Sue Surkes/Times of Israel)
From left: Gilad Ostrovsky, chief forester and forestry department director at KKL-JNF, Chanan Zoref, recently retired director of the Judean Mountains District, and Shani Rohatyn-Blitz, the forestry department's coordinator of research and international relations, April 16, 2024. (Sue Surkes/Times of Israel)

Look at the trees next time you picnic in a KKL-JNF Jewish National Fund recreation area.

This reporter did it on Independence Day last month when Israelis typically head for nature for barbecues.

We sat among tall trees — rows of trunks, to be precise, with shade coming from canopies high up at the top. With no low branches in the way, families strung hammocks and zip lines between the trees. With the canopies far away, there was little risk of a barbecue sparking a fire.

A recent tour with KKL officials revealed this forest design to be part of a research-based policy determining how best to tailor forest management to its purpose.

The tour also cast light on some of the questions facing this 103-year-old body, as iconic pine forests age and the emphasis moves from planting vast armies of pines and cypress trees towards encouraging more local, broadleaf, species to grow naturally. The pressure to develop open space to keep up with population growth is only increasing. Meanwhile, climate change is spurring more pests, wildfires, drought and flooding.

The KKL, a quasi-governmental body that oversees 13 percent of Israel’s land has planted over 240 million trees on some 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) over more than a century.

A rope between high-cropped trees forms an ad hoc zipline for children at the KKL’s Carmel Beach Forest in northern Israel on Israel Independence Day, May 14, 2024. (Sue Surkes/Times of Israel)

Around half of these forests are based on coniferous pines and cypresses, planted in single-species rows in the 1950s and 1960s. Dominating the mix has been the Jerusalem (or Aleppo) pine because of its resistance to lack of water and its ability to grow in chalky soil on the hills. Planting continued in the 1970s and 80s, with native broad-leaved species such as oaks, pistachios, and carobs added.

New era of planned planting

Today, the policy has evolved to only planting when a specific goal requires it.

As Chanoch Zoref, the recently retired director of KKL’s Judean Mountains District, says, “In the Judean Hills, we haven’t planted for 20 years, not after fires, and not after snow. The policy today is not to plant automatically but to ask what the purpose of the place is; to ask not where we can plant, but if there is a reason to plant.”

At the Forest of the Martyrs northwest of Jerusalem, where six million trees have been planted over 60 years in memory of the Jews killed during the Holocaust, a research station has been operating since 2009, in partnership with the state’s Volcani Center for agricultural R&D. This has been testing how best to encourage forest rejuvenation and biodiversity through different levels of tree thinning. The purposeful thinning of trees is the KKL-JNF’s main forestry management tool, boosted by livestock grazing to keep weeds down.

Native woodland species thrive in the light created by thinning conifer trees at the KKL-JNF research station at Martyr’s Forest near Jerusalem, April 16, 2024. (Sue Surkes/Times of Israel)

The results, combined with decades of accumulated experience, form part of a detailed sustainable forestry management policy produced by JNF-KKL. Foresters are given point-by-point guidance on how best to thin trees in different circumstances to enable those that remain to flourish, allow other species to grow, and increase resilience as the atmosphere warms and the soil dries.

“Fifteen years ago, the KKL changed from an organization that looked after trees to one that manages ecosystems long-term and undertakes target-driven, sustainable management,” explains Zoref.

“The original aim was to grow trees and perhaps provide for leisure. Today, we have a list of goals connected to ecosystem services such as preventing soil erosion, absorbing [global warming] carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and encouraging biodiversity [a richness of living creatures] each according to the location,” he says.

Additional goals include protecting open vistas, educating the public about nature, and providing a diversity of landscapes, fire breaks, buffer zones around communities to reduce noise and pollution, rest areas, picnic sites and bike paths.

Restoring damaged habitats

At the Kisalon Stream, a short drive away, KKL has focused on rehabilitating a damaged riverside habitat by thinning out pines to encourage riverbank plants to flourish and destroying stands of blue-leaf wattle, an aggressively invasive plant from Australia.

Blue-leaf wattle. (Zeynel Cebeci, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Common)

Here, as in a third of KKL forests countrywide, staff have gone out with detailed checklists to record, map, and photograph everything from trees (height, density, circumference, and species type) to the presence and number of any of a long list of rare and endangered plants and the radius needed to protect them.

The maps form the basis for long-term, annual and seasonal management plans.

Aiming to have all the forests mapped within five years, Gilad Ostrovsky, chief forester and forestry department director at KKL, says mapping has to be carried out before any work begins.

Where is the KKL still planting?

According to Ostrovsky, most KKL planting is being undertaken to renew forests in the country’s north and south. (No figures were available for the number of conifers planted in recent years).

In the Gilboa hills, for example, where endangered species such as the Gilboa iris grow, native broadleaf trees have been planted in places where conifer forests have grown old.

Broad-leaved trees are also being planted where shade is needed for visitors.

Broad-leaved trees planted for shade around picnic tables in the Judean hills west of Jerusalem, April 16, 2024. (Sue Surkes/Times of Israel)

In the south, however, planting has brought the organization into conflict with Bedouin Arabs who see it as part of a state plan to evict them from their unrecognized villages.

Violent clashes erupted two years, ago, after the state contracted the KKL to plant there.

Bridging a gap?

The not-for-profit Society for the Protection of Nature has long knocked heads with the KKL for what the former sees as an overzealous commitment to planting trees, even in open grassland habitats called batha. These have their ecosystems, and trees today are naturally scarce there.

Batha shrubland in the Lahav area, southern Israel. (Alon Rothschild)

The KKL has also been at odds with the state’s Israel Nature and Parks Authority over the former’s attachment to inflammable conifer forests and reluctance to remove seedlings that sprout after fires.

“KKL brings a tradition of always doing something, while the parks authority’s tradition is not to intervene,” Zoref sums up.

But he adds that as the Parks Authority minimizes intervention, and KKL intervenes more to prevent wildfires and remove invasive species, the two organizations are slowly moving closer in managing Israel’s ecosystems.

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