Oregon’s Climate Plan vs the Blue Mountains Forest Plan

First, some facts!

These things are true, and they are important to keep in mind while reading the following comparison of the draft Blue Mountains Forest Plan preferred alternative with Oregon’s Seventh Climate Assessment.

1. The Trump Administration ordered that any and all mention of climate change in the federal government be erased. In addition, national emergencies have been declared to directly benefit the industries (including the timber industry) that most contribute to climate change.

2. The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) convened the Blues Intergovernmental Council (BIC) to help ensure that the Blue Mountains Forest Plan has the support of county commissioners. These individuals are largely aligned with the timber and grazing industries which have substantial political power across Northeast Oregon.
   

Introducing Oregon’s Seventh Climate Assessment

By state legislation, the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute convenes to author a report on how climate change will impact Oregon, along with recommendations on how to best mitigate this impact. The seventh installment of this assessment was published in January 2025 and contains many recommendations for the Blue Mountains Ecoregion that are directly applicable to how federal public lands are managed in the region. However, the draft Blue Mountains Forest Plan that is open for public comment until September 30, 2026, ignores these recommendations and would detrimentally impact Oregon’s climate goals.

Comparing the Blue Mountains Forest Plan Draft EIS with the Seventh Oregon Climate Assessment

If you read both the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Blue Mountains Forest Plan and the Seventh Oregon Climate Assessment that was released in early 2025, finding areas of alignment is near impossible. 

Oregon’s Climate Assessment was written by the state’s foremost climate experts. Its aim is to help: “inform actions such as equitable mitigation of climate-related natural hazards and implementation of Oregon’s Climate Change Adaptation Framework.” Management of millions of acres of critical forest habitats that serve as climate refugia in Northeast Oregon should contribute toward this effort if Oregon is to meet its goals.

By comparison, the draft Blue Mountains Forest Plan was written by staff who work for the U.S. Forest Service, and it mostly aims to benefit the timber industry. In the words of Nick Smith, Public Affairs staff for American Forest Resources Council, a timber industry lobbying group: “[The Blue Mountains] national forests face some of the highest wildfire, insect and disease risks in the West.” 

The peer reviewed climate science of the Oregon Climate Assessment, however, debunks the timber industry’s claims that the best way to foster climate-adapted forests in the Blues is to drastically ramp up “active management” of these forests. In the draft Blue Mountains Forest Plan preferred alternative, active management exclusively means increasing commercial logging activities and ignores climate and wildlife focused restoration activities including prescribed burns.

What happened to climate change?

When reading the Blue Mountains Forest Plan Draft EIS, you won’t find any mention of climate change. Instead, you’ll see the term carbon storage used, surely to comply with the federal mandate to erase climate change from the federal government’s lexicon. Along these same lines, climate fear mongering replaces the best available science throughout the draft plan. Many of the plan prescriptions follow the assumption that future fires will lead to conditions that convert forested lands to new vegetation types, thereby reducing carbon stocks held in these forests, a favorite timber industry talking point. According to the Forest Service, it is a foregone conclusion that these forests will store less carbon in the future, so they must be heavily logged before future fires will wipe them out. 

Missing from the plan is an adequate discussion of the science around fire and forest conversion. Oregon has convened its best scientists to study this very issue, and no surprise, the conclusions differ significantly. The Oregon Climate Assessment calls for more forest cover in the Blues as a key contribution to achieving Oregon’s climate goals in the decades ahead.

Oregon’s Climate Assessment and forestry

To reach the state’s climate sequestration goals, the Oregon Climate Action Commission “recommended a goal of sequestering at least an additional 5 million metric tons of CO2e

[carbon dioxide equivalent] per year in natural and working lands by 2030, and at least 9.5 million metric tons of CO2e per year by 2050 relative to a 2010–2019 activity-based business-as-usual net [carbon] sequestration baseline.” Eastern Oregon’s share of wet montane areas, among other lands across Oregon, are specifically highlighted due to their favorable conditions for tree growth. At GHCC we understand. For over 50 years we’ve advocated for these forests given their potential to grow giant fire resistant trees.

Oregon’s Climate Assessment explores both reforestation, which means restoring degraded forests, and afforestation, which is converting non-forested lands to forests. It recommends reforestation where possible, increasing tree density in areas where trees are not primarily grown for harvest, such as private timberlands, and restoring forest cover in riparian areas, specifically calling out Eastern Oregon, where “livestock grazing has historically been the dominant driver of loss and degradation of riparian zones.”

The map above includes the areas identified as having the potential for forests in Oregon and their current land cover type from the Oregon Climate Assessment that is overlaid on a map showing the National Forest boundaries covered by the Blue Mountains Forest Plan. Note that a significant percentage of the green dots are in roadless areas that the USFS plans to open to intensive logging.

Maps in the Oregon Climate Assessment show just how much potential for reforestation exists across the Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla and Malheur National Forests. This conflicts with the Forest Service’s claims that the Blue Mountains national forests are overstocked to dangerous levels and are healthier by increasing commercial logging by over 300% for the next three decades. 

One common statement from the timber industry is that fires result in catastrophic carbon emissions, while forestry actually sequesters carbon from the atmosphere. This claim is bogus; it directly contradicts the results of studies by Oregon’s leading climate and fire ecologists. Throughout Oregon’s Climate Assessment, it reinforces the science that: “wildfires tend to have limited effects on standing carbon stocks regardless of severity.” The industry also ignores a 2018 study which demonstrated that Oregon’s timber industry accounts for the largest portion of the state’s climate emissions, 35% of the state’s total and nearly 9 times as much as emissions from fires during the 2011-2015 period. 

Armed with this data and the work of Oregon’s leading climate scientists, the push for a huge increase in commercial logging in the Blues should be read for what it is, a huge giveaway to private interests at the expense of Oregon’s ability to achieve its climate goals. 

What about drought?

Another key concern is drought, and again, the Blue Mountains Forest Plan makes little reference to it. Riparian restoration is key to forest health, and the plan should expand on the role our national forests play in water quantity and quality.

Roadless areas sustain the water quality for rural communities. 25 million Americans get water from watersheds protected through the Roadless Rule. The draft Blue Mountains Forest Plan preferred alternative takes over 700,000 acres of roadless areas and puts them into areas that can be commercially logged.

While the Oregon Climate Assessment indicates a high likelihood of seasonal summer soil moisture changes due to lower snowpack and higher temps, it anticipates that these seasonal droughts will not be long-term persistent due to increases in spring and fall rainfall. It’s impossible to guess what the long-term drought conditions will look like across the Blue Mountains, but it’s safe to say that the water cycle of the future will be substantially different from the past. Surprisingly, the preferred alternative avoids the discussion of drought altogether. The Oregon Climate Assessment provides a much more thorough analysis, and in doing so, it does not align with the U.S. Forest Service’s preferred prescriptions of logging increases and removing protections for large trees in riparian areas. These actions would harm watershed resilience and water retention.

But there are more fires, right?

While there are more acres burned in the Blue Mountains compared to the past 90 years of fire suppression, the fear these fires cause to our communities is no justification for the prescriptions in the plan. In fact, exploiting this fear to remove longstanding protections is gross negligence. The draft Blue Mountains Forest Plan’s preferred alternative does not call for increasing prescribed fire. Nor does it focus on thinning overstocked forests. It does, however, produce huge timber targets without guidelines or standards on which trees to keep and which to cut. No wonder the timber industry loves this plan. To suggest this would lead to the kind of restoration work that supports forest resilience to fire is a staggeringly huge leap.

Again looking to the Oregon Climate Assessment for guidance, it provides a thorough explanation on how to best prepare communities for fire. Large wind driven fires are the primary driver of structure loss from wildfires. There is little that a forest treatment can do to reduce the rapid spread of these fires, and home hardening techniques that orient protection from the home outwards are well established as the best method to keep a structure from burning. 

This is important. Historically, we are well below the annual rate of acres burned. Indigenous societies understood the beneficial role of fire. Industry sees otherwise, while also avoiding accountability when presented with data that shows how forestry itself is responsible for the conditions that lead to the high intensity fires. 

The Blue Mountains Ecoregion is an incredible climate refugia because of its combination of a high variability of elevations and microclimates, high biodiversity of both plants and animals, low human development pressure with a matching low population density, and some of the largest undammed watersheds remaining in the continental United States. In addition, the region is an East-West-oriented ecologically-intact landscape that connects the Rockies to the Cascades and the Great Basin. This land is unique in its role that it plays for climate and biodiversity, and with such a large percentage of those lands being a part of the Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla and Malheur National Forests, they should be managed for this purpose.

The Oregon Climate Assessment provides a compelling roadmap for the Blue Mountains. By investing in opportunities for reforestation and actively restoring watersheds impacted primarily by logging and cattle grazing, the Blue Mountains Forest Plan can be updated to align with the state’s climate goals. Sadly, with the preferred plan that the U.S. Forest Service has released, the agency is going in the opposite direction. 

Please join the public comment, open until September 30, 2026, to share your hopes and concerns for a Blue Mountains Forest Plan that aligns with Oregon’s climate goals.