SEATTLE — In Seattle’s Seward Park, President Joe Biden on Friday signed an executive order to inventory mature and old-growth trees, reflecting a high-profile and intensifying global focus on the role that forests can play in combating climate change.
The order states that American forests absorb more than 10% of annual U.S. economywide greenhouse-gas emissions. It calls conserving old-growth and mature forests on federal lands “critical to protecting these and other ecosystem services provided by these forests.”
The order called out climate change and catastrophic wildfires — not logging — as threats to these trees, and does not prescribe how these forests should be managed once the inventory is finished. In the executive order, the inventory is part of a broader suite of actions that include reforestation, seed collection and developing “climate smart” strategies to address the threats to mature and old-growth forests.
