President Trump is pushing federal agencies to expand timber harvests. He issued an executive order on March 1 ordering the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Agriculture, and the Chief of the United States Forest Service to come up with plans to increase logging, citing a goal to protect “national and economic security.”

Trump also increased timber sales during his first term.

The U.S. Forest Service is already set to increase the number of trees it harvests to one of the highest levels since 2019, a result of Biden-era policies.

But advocates argue that we need trees now more than ever, and this increase in timber harvest doesn’t make sense. The Forest Service is facing a lawsuit challenging the timber target policies that they say put the climate at risk.

Advocates say the agency should protect mature forests with trees such as red oaks, which play a crucial role in storing and sequestering carbon. A single tree can store as much as 28,000 pounds of CO2 in its lifetime, the equivalent annual emissions from generating electricity for one to two American homes.

The Forest Service routinely logs in national forests – it’s part of its standard management plan. In a 2022 report to Congress, the agency said it would increase logging in the east, south, and Pacific Northwest. The eastern and southern regions, covering all national forests from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic, have historically been logged the most.

The pandemic disrupted the agency’s plan to increase timber harvests. The agency is increasing its harvest to four billion board feet in 2026, said Spencer Scheidt, staff attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. That’s “enough lumber to circle the globe more than 30 times,” according to the law firm.

How timber targets work

National Forest Service spokesperson, Wade Muehlhof, said in an email that the service has stepped up its forest management efforts over the last 15 years. But the volume sold on the private market has fluctuated.

Muehlhof said reducing wildfire risk has contributed to the increase in the number of acres logged, but a decrease in volume sold. Other factors causing the timber targets to decrease recently included “increased operating costs, litigation, wildfire, flat budgets, and reduced capacity.”

The Forest Service was established by Congress to provide timber for the nation’s benefit and was later directed to broaden its management scope to include additional multiple uses and benefits.

Each year, the Forest Service’s Washington office assigns timber targets to its nine regional offices, which are handed down to individual national forest units, which then develop projects to meet those goals. The national forests then set up timber sales to private companies.

But as the world warms and the impacts of climate change worsen, advocates say the Forest Service has never “accounted for the aggregate carbon effects of actions taken to fulfill its timber targets,” according to the complaint in the lawsuit.

Muehlhof confirmed the agency “does not account for the aggregate carbon effects of actions when setting its timber targets because it upholds a carbon stewardship posture and does not manage for carbon.”

Advocates pointed out that the Forest Service has a legal obligation under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to assess the environmental impacts of its projects. NEPA has twin aims, requiring agencies to consider the environmental impacts of proposed actions and inform the public of how those impacts are factored into their decisions.

But many Forest Service projects receive exclusions, which allows certain projects to skip the more in-depth environmental reviews because they’re considered to have little or no impact on the environment.

Three Forest Service projects named in the lawsuit, which include national forests in the east and south, have gone through environmental assessment per NEPA, which requires assessing the carbon effects of proposed projects. But advocates said the Forest Service failed to comply with the federal regulation because they underestimated the carbon effects of these projects when setting timber targets.

Forests store carbon

Trees are an incredibly effective carbon sink, removing CO2 from the air and sequestering it for generations if left alone. Hardwood trees – such as oak and hickory, commonly found in many states east of the Mississippi River – typically store more carbon than softwoods, like pine.

Recent research shows that aging forests in the region have great potential for carbon storage, which can increase even further as they mature.

Most forests in the Central Hardwoods Region, which stretches from Missouri to West Virginia, are second-growth, having been logged at least once over the past two centuries. Only a handful of these forests are truly old-growth, with trees older than 150 years and minimal human disturbance over the last several decades.

During westward expansion, the Midwest experienced significant deforestation as settlers, farmers, and logging companies cleared forestlands over several decades. This clearance was driven by the need for agricultural land, timber resources, and urban development, leading to profound changes in the region’s landscape.

“Even the large, mature forests you see today in the Ozarks are not the original forests that existed 200 years ago,” said Michael Bill, Missouri’s state forester.

Older forests capture CO2 more slowly, but are crucial for carbon storage and continue to play a significant role in locking up carbon as they grow.

Advocates are concerned that old-growth forests will be at risk if timber targets increase. Josh Kelly, Resilient Forests Director for MountainTrue, an environmental organization based in North Carolina and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Forest Service, explained that the targets are measured by volume rather than acres and could effectively encourage cutting older, bigger trees, which store the most carbon.

The Biden administration proposed amending all forest land management plans in 2024 to protect old-growth forests across the entire National Forest System, which spans 43 states. The proposed plan called the National Old-Growth Amendment, aimed to prohibit commercial logging on nearly 25 million acres of old growth. But ProPublica found it has allowed the Bureau of Land Management to cut old-growth trees at a faster rate than the previous decade.

The Forest Service withdrew from the plan in January, and environmentalists see an opportunity to protect old forests but remain cautious, given the likelihood that the Trump administration will continue to increase timber sales. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said in a statement that the agency has gained “important insights that can help to guide our future stewardship of these special forests.”

Ryan Talbott, conservation advocate for WildEarth Guardians, said increased timber targets contradict the plan to protect old-growth forests. “On the one hand, you’re telling the public we’re going to protect and recruit old growth, and then on the other, you’re telling … the regions we need to increase logging,” he said.

“This is a really easy way to combat the climate crisis if we just allow trees to grow and continue to grow and not cut them,” Talbott added.

About two-thirds of the carbon storage in forests happens underground, not in the trees, research shows. But when trees are cut down, the carbon gradually reenters the atmosphere.

Too much emphasis on cutting timber

MountainTrue advocate, Kelly, said the Forest Service puts too much emphasis on cutting timber. The main problem is that “it’s elevated above other goals, and it’s something that forest leadership is evaluated on in their performance reviews annually,” he said, adding he believes some of their organization’s records requests to the Forest Service support this. The Forest Service did not respond to this claim.

MountainTrue’s goal isn’t to stop timber harvest, but to ensure a “balance” between logging and the risk of exacerbating climate change, Kelly said.

He said the lawsuit only applies to the east and the south regions under the Forest Service, adding that “some of the timber harvests happening out west [are] legitimate and needed to reduce wildfire risk.” In the complaint, the plaintiffs asked the court to stop the Forest Service from offering any more timber sales for fiscal year 2024 in the eastern and southern Regions “excluding harvests necessary to mitigate wildfire risks.”

In a response to the lawsuit in May, the Forest Service didn’t address the concerns about carbon storage and sequestration; instead, it claimed that the legal challenges didn’t target any specific, final decisions made by the government that the court can review.

Caroline Pufalt, with the Missouri chapter of the Sierra Club, said excessive logging can greatly affect wildlife habitats because it changes how much sunlight an area is exposed to and how quickly water flows through the land. Trees act as natural water regulators. Their roots help to absorb and retain water, allowing it to slowly seep into the ground rather than running off immediately.

“If you were an amphibian … standing around on the forest floor and knew where your little wet areas were likely to be, they would not be there again for…a good number of years,” she said.

Eventually, Pufalt said National Forests should “forget about the timber target” and focus on managing forests based on ecological principles. While timber production would still occur, it would be balanced with ecological considerations, potentially resulting in reduced timber yields but healthier, more resilient forests.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.