—for their water, so it's vitally important in a region like ours, which has a vulnerable aquifer, to have both a drought and a flood management capability. When we have floods, of course, those wells also become contaminated. They get dry under one condition and then they become contaminated in other conditions. Thank you so much for the really important work that you guys do at Quinte Conservation in helping us to better understand how we can adapt to the changing conditions we're faced with.
I'd like to go to Rob now.
Rob, you talked about the impacts of trees—and actually I want to read a quote, because it's a really powerful quote from you. You said, “We need to realize that to have a healthy economy and a healthy society, we need healthy forests. To have healthy forests for our future, we need to plant more trees.”
To date, the 50-million tree program has planted 27 million trees, so you're more than halfway there. With our 15,000 hectares of new forest, on average, every year the program has planted 2.5 million trees on approximately 4,000 properties. According to the environment commissioner's report, average forest coverage in southern Ontario stands at around 26%, with some areas seeing as low as 5% forest cover. The report identified that 30% of lands need to be planted with trees to restore the forest cover in southern Ontario to optimal levels. That equates to 680,000 hectares.
So just how devastating is the cutting of this program? I guess you've talked a little bit about not planting them, and the problem of a lack of forest. Maybe you could expand on that.