As the federal government pushes for more logging and grazing on Oregon’s lands, state climate commissioners are calling for more ambitious goals to protect the state’s land and water so they can capture carbon dioxide.
The 13 voting members of the governor-appointed Oregon Climate Action Commission last week called to double goals they set just five years ago for capturing and storing additional carbon dioxide each year in the state’s forest, grass, crop and wetlands. The targets are recommendations meant to guide state land managers and lawmakers and not statutorily enforceable
To meet goals of eliminating nearly 10 million additional metric tons of greenhouse gases each year via natural carbon capture and storage in forests, grasslands, wetlands and more by 2035, climate commissioners recommend that state lawmakers and agencies act to protect those forests from heavy logging, wetlands from development and promote farming techniques that improve soil health, among other recommendations.
Oregon’s lands and waters each year already capture and store greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere that are equivalent to soaking up the emissions of about 11 million gas-powered cars, according to a 2021 commission analysis. The new 2035 targets would mean improving the health and scale of the state’s natural lands so that they could eliminate the emissions equivalent of more than 13 million gas-powered cars each year.
In 2021, the commission proposed the state should improve landscape health to capture and store 5 million additional metric tons of greenhouse gasses each year by 2030. Now, the goal is nearly 10 million additional metric tons per year by 2035.
Competing priorities
The new targets come as the state’s efforts to harness the power of those lands and waters to confront the growing threat of climate change have in recent years gone up in flames due to historic wildfires, and have been challenged by President Donald Trump’s competing priorities for Oregon’s natural resources.
The federal government manages more than half the land in Oregon, where Trump officials have rolled back conservation policies and pushed for more logging, grazing and extractive industries that emit rather than store greenhouse gases.
Commission Chair Cathy Macdonald, who is also the North America director of natural climate solutions at the international nonprofit environmental group The Nature Conservancy, said that’s all the more reason to double down on state-level climate work.
“Changes at the federal level make it much more important for the state to increase resources to advance the adoption of practices that result in increases in net sequestration and resilience on natural and working lands,” Macdonald said in a statement.
The commission proposes reaching an overall 20% higher rate of carbon capture per year on Oregon’s lands and waters than it proposed just five years ago, though it moved the timeline out from 2030 to 2035.
The commission identified several management and policy recommendations legislators could begin implementing in the next three to five years, including investments in technical assistance, data collection and analysis, grants and other incentives for land managers to boost landscape health.
In 2023, the Oregon Legislature passed a “Climate Resilience Package” that included $10 million of state investment in “natural climate solutions” on Oregon’s working lands, including conservation, restoration and improved land and aquatic management.
And in 2025, Gov. Tina Kotek issued an executive order directing state natural resource agencies to coordinate on actions and strategies to preserve in the next decade 10% more of Oregon’s most climate-resilient lands and waters.
Although the bulk of Oregon’s lands — nearly 50% — are grasslands, the recommendations rely heavily on the potential carbon benefits of better protecting Oregon’s forests. That’s because the state’s forests sequester more carbon every year than any other land category. About 8% of the state is cropland and about 4% is made up of wetlands, according to the commission’s 2021 analysis.
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