Forests are important for slowing climate change. They remove huge quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – 30 percent of all fossil fuel emissions annually – and store carbon in trees and soils.
Old and mature forests are important: They handle droughts, storms and wildfires better than young trees, and they store more carbon.
In a 2022 executive order, President Joe Biden called for conserving mature and old-growth forests on federal lands. Recently Biden protected nearly half of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska from road-building and logging.
The Biden administration is compiling an inventory of mature and old-growth forests on public lands that will support further conservation actions. At the same time, federal agencies are initiating and implementing numerous logging projects in mature and old forests without accounting for how these projects will affect climate change or forest species.
The White House Council on Environmental Quality has directed federal agencies to consider the effects of climate change when they propose major federal actions that significantly affect the environment.
Some logging projects fall into this category, but many large logging projects that affect thousands of acres have been legally exempted from such analysis.
