Biden to sign Earth Day order protecting old-growth forests

President Biden is set to sign an executive order Friday protecting old-growth forests on federal lands, White House officials told reporters. 

The order will direct the Interior and Agriculture secretaries to conduct the first inventory of such forests and develop new policies for their management and conservation, officials told reporters. It will also require them to develop 2030 reforestation targets for their respective agencies. 

Biden will sign the order to mark Earth Day, following several other environmental announcements by the White House over the course of the week, including a transportation program under the bipartisan infrastructure law aimed at reducing transportation-related emissions. 

Officials on the call presented the order as vital to both conservation and reducing the risk of wildfires. Old-growth forests typically have more vegetation than younger ones, and thus more fuel for fires. 

Preservation of old-growth forests “will reduce the trajectory of wildfire risk to communities and natural resources, including mature and old growth forests,” a White House official said on the call. “At the end of the day, nature is one of our best and most cost-effective defenses we have against climate change.” 

Officials on the call did not offer a specific definition of “old-growth forests” that the order would use. Experts and officials have defined the term in various ways, but one of the simpler ones, established for the U.S. Forest Service, defines old-growth forests as “ecosystems distinguished by old trees and related structural attributes…that may include tree size, accumulations of large dead woody material, number of canopy layers, species composition, and ecosystem function.”  

A Department of Agriculture official added that “one of the key tenets [of the order] is actually to come up with a workable definition that accounts for regional variations and ecological variations.” 

White House officials said the order will also address a commitment the U.S. made at 2021’s COP26 climate summit to do its part in ending natural forest loss by the end of the decade. The order will instruct the State Department to coordinate with other agencies to develop a report on phasing out agricultural commodities grown on illegally-deforested land.  

The order will also direct the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a group of 13 federal agencies, to develop an assessment of the state of nature within the U.S., officials said.