Enviva and The Longleaf Alliance announced the signing of a five-year partnership to protect and restore longleaf pine forests, one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in North America. Enviva and The Longleaf Alliance will collaboratively implement Enviva’s longleaf forest restoration plan.

Longleaf pine forests are a critical forest ecosystem in the southeastern U.S. They are considered high conservation value forests because of their rarity and biodiversity value. Longleaf forests support some of the highest levels of small-scale species diversity of any forest ecosystem in North America.

Once spreading over 90 million acres, longleaf forests today only cover about 4.7 million acres. The partnership between Enviva and The Longleaf Alliance will support the goals of America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative, an extensive collaboration to increase acreage of longleaf pine forests to 8 million acres across the southeastern U.S.

The Longleaf Alliance will provide technical expertise to ensure that Enviva’s biomass sourcing in mapped longleaf forests improves forest ecosystem conditions. Because many existing longleaf forests need thinning, and because millions of acres of former longleaf forests were converted to other forest types, appropriate biomass removals are a critical step in the longleaf restoration process.

Together, Enviva and The Longleaf Alliance will work with stakeholders, landowners, land managers, and others to support longleaf restoration on public and private lands, as well as to monitor, track, and report on progress.

Enviva Holdings, LP is the world’s largest producer of industrial wood pellets, a renewable and sustainable energy source.