MEMO: To Address the Climate Crisis, We Must Protect our Forests

Conserving our remaining older forests and trees on federal public lands is one of the country’s most straightforward, impactful, and cost-effective climate solutions. The older parts of our nation’s forests are climate and biodiversity champions — they sequester large amounts of carbon and can store that carbon for centuries, providing the foundation for a diversity of life. 

If the Biden Administration is going to lead in solving the climate and biodiversity crises, it must protect these carbon critical climate forests and set an example for the world. Along with over 70 groups that support the Climate Forests Campaign, Sierra Club calls on the Administration to enact a strong, lasting rule that protects old and mature trees and forests across federal lands as a cornerstone of US climate policy.

***Senior Sierra Club policy staff and spokespeople are available to discuss the importance of supporting old forest conservation in tackling the climate crisis and protecting our communities***

Forest conservation is the missing piece of US climate policy

• Reducing emissions alone is an insufficient strategy for addressing the climate crisis we face today — the US must also sequester and store significant amounts of legacy emissions from the atmosphere. 

• While there are numerous promising technologies that can help us meet this need in the future, our best near-term opportunities are natural climate solutions that enable us to store vast amounts of carbon in our forests and agricultural lands. Conserving mature and old growth forests offers the most significant, straightforward way to leverage this potential. 

• Protecting and recovering mature growth forests is a simple, cost effective climate solution and a climate forest policy is the missing piece of US efforts to address the climate crisis. 

• Of the human-caused global CO2 emissions since 1870, 26 percent is due to emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. 

• Older, mature forests have the greatest potential to sequester and store significant amounts of carbon, and to recover carbon that has been released to the atmosphere over the last 200 years. 

Why mature trees and forests? 

• Experts estimate that as much as 95 percent of primary forests (those that have never been logged) have been lost in the United States. We must protect what's left, and strive to recover what's been lost. 

• Protecting mature forests is our best chance for recovering old-growth. 

• There is a pressing need for federal natural resource agencies to also evolve into carbon management agencies, starting with the management of forests on federal lands. 

• There were 58.7 billion metric tons of carbon stored in U.S. forests in 2020. Keeping this carbon in the forests is critical to safeguarding communities from the future impacts of the climate crisis.

• There were 216 million metric tons of carbon sequestered from the atmosphere by U.S. forests in 2019. There is no other technology that can remove carbon from the atmosphere at this scale.

• Over 95 percent of forest carbon is stored in forest ecosystem pools vs. harvested wood products. This is why it's important to protect these critical carbon reservoirs.

Conserving forests provides essential support for community protection

• In the US, forests are our largest source of drinking water. National Forests alone are the source of drinking water for over 60 million Americans. 

• Mature and old growth forest watersheds protect both drinking water quality and quantity. 

• Differences in fire regimes among ecoregions should be an important part of the decision-making process, as some forests are much less vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis than other forests. In some study areas, old-growth forests burned much cooler than younger forests, which were more likely to experience high-severity fire. 

• This is explained by thicker protective bark on bigger, older trees, and by higher multilayer canopies which keep temperatures cool, and enable the forest to retain more moisture in the air and soil.

Forests fight biodiversity loss 

• Wildlife corridors and climate refugia (areas that maintain natural microclimates) help wildlife move and find suitable habitat in a rapidly changing world. Many of these features can be enhanced or restored by protecting mature growth forests.