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Climate & Carbon Storage
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April 2026 4 min read

Wood harvest is one of the largest unaccounted-for sources of carbon emissions on the planet — comparable to all global agricultural land-use change. Repealing the Roadless Rule would convert intact carbon sinks into long-lived emissions on a continental scale.

Climate and Carbon Impacts

The Roadless Rule is one of the largest carbon-protection policies in U.S. law, even though it has rarely been described that way. The 58 million acres it covers store extraordinary amounts of biomass carbon and soil carbon — much of it in old-growth and mature forests that cannot be replaced on any climate-relevant timescale. Repealing the Rule would convert that carbon stock into a long-lived emissions liability.

How big is the global wood-harvest carbon cost?

The most authoritative recent estimate comes from Peng, Searchinger, Zionts, and Waite (Nature, 2023):

We find that forest harvests between 2010 and 2050 will probably have annualized carbon costs of 3.5–4.2 Gt CO₂e yr⁻¹, which approach common estimates of annual emissions from land-use change due to agricultural expansion.

In other words, global wood harvest is a carbon source roughly the size of all agricultural land-use change worldwide — 3 to 4 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent per year. It is one of the largest "unaccounted" emissions categories in conventional climate accounting because growing trees are assumed to offset what felled trees release. Peng et al. show that assumption fails on the timescales that matter for policy. No scenario in their analysis reduced these costs below 3.5 Gt CO₂e per year.

What logging actually does to U.S. forest carbon

Within the United States, Harris et al. (Carbon Balance and Management, 2016) attributed forest carbon losses across the conterminous U.S. to specific disturbance types. The headline finding:

Forest land remaining forest land lost 184 ± 10 Tg C year⁻¹ to disturbance (13% from natural disturbance, 87% from harvest); these were compensated by net carbon gains of 452 ± 48 Tg C year⁻¹. C losses from natural and human-induced disturbances reduced the potential net C sink in US forests by 42% compared to the potential sink estimated without disturbance effects.

Regional breakdown — harvest as a share of disturbance-related forest carbon loss:

  • Southern U.S.: 92%
  • Northern U.S.: 86%
  • Western U.S.: 66%

Harvest, not wildfire and not insects, is the dominant source of forest-carbon loss across U.S. forests. The 2001 Roadless Rule has been one of the only federal restraints on the geographic expansion of that loss.

Where the emissions come from inside a logging operation

Ellis et al. (Forest Ecology and Management, 2019) traced emissions from selective logging in tropical community forests and found a pattern that generalizes to temperate logging as well: 73% of carbon emissions came from the remnants of trees felled for their timber (the unmarketed crowns, branches, and stumps left in the forest), 11% from skidding, 8% from transport infrastructure (logging roads and landings), and 7% from collateral damage to neighboring trees. New roads are not just a fragmentation problem. They are a direct line item in the carbon ledger.

Roads have a soil-carbon legacy too

Lloyd, Lohse, and Ferré (Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2013) compared two road-reclamation strategies on the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho. Their finding:

Total soil carbon storage increased 6-fold to 65 metric tons C/km (to 25 cm depth) in the northwestern United States compared with untreated abandoned roads.

The reverse of that finding is the relevant one for the rescission: building a new road into a roadless area does not just emit the timber it removes. It removes most of the soil carbon under the new roadbed itself. That carbon does not return until and unless the road is fully recontoured — a step the Forest Service rarely takes after construction.

The Tongass and the largest single carbon stake

DellaSala, Gorelik, and Walker (Land, 2022) documented that the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska contains exceptionally large biomass and soil carbon stocks. About 92% of the Tongass falls inside inventoried roadless areas. The 2025 Federal Register notice specifically directs USDA to reinstate the 2020 Alaska Roadless Rule, which exempted the Tongass from federal roadless protection. The Tongass alone contains an estimated 2.7 billion metric tons of carbon in living biomass and soils — more than the total annual fossil-fuel emissions of any country except China and the United States. There is no climate plausibility to a federal policy that opens it to road construction and timber harvest.

What this means for the rescission

The Federal Register notice initiating the rescission contains no climate analysis. It does not estimate carbon emissions from converting roadless areas to active management. It does not engage the Peng et al. global wood-harvest carbon cost. It does not engage the Harris et al. U.S.-specific harvest attribution. It does not address the soil-carbon impact of new roads. The omission is large enough to be a substantive defect in the rulemaking record under the National Environmental Policy Act.

The Roadless Rule is a climate policy. Rescinding it is a climate decision — and the data we already have say it is the wrong one.

Sources

  • Peng, L., Searchinger, T. D., Zionts, J., & Waite, R. (2023). The carbon costs of global wood harvests. Nature, 620, 110–115. doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06187-1
  • Harris, N. L., et al. (2016). Attribution of net carbon change by disturbance type across forest lands of the conterminous United States. Carbon Balance and Management, 11, 24. doi.org/10.1186/s13021-016-0066-5
  • Ellis, E. A., et al. (2019). Reduced-impact logging practices reduce forest disturbance and carbon emissions in community managed forests on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. Forest Ecology and Management, 437, 396–410. doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2019.01.040
  • Lloyd, R. A., Lohse, K. A., & Ferré, T. P. A. (2013). Influence of road reclamation techniques on forest ecosystem recovery. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 11(2), 75–81. doi.org/10.1890/120116
  • DellaSala, D. A., Gorelik, S. R., & Walker, W. S. (2022). The Tongass National Forest: A natural climate solution of global significance. Land, 11(5), 717. doi.org/10.3390/land11050717
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