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Carbon implications of wood harvesting and forest management

Nature volume 646, pages E18–E19 (2025)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 29 October 2025

The Original Article was published on 05 July 2023

arising from: L. Peng et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06187-1 (2023).

There is a long-running debate about whether timber harvesting is carbon neutral. The paper by Peng et al.1 proposes a site-by-site, no-harvest counterfactual method to estimate the net carbon effects of wood harvesting, and finds that emissions from wood harvesting are undercounted by 3.5–4.2 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent per year (Gt CO2e yr−1). We argue that existing approaches correctly count net emissions of timber harvesting and that the approach taken in Peng et al.1—a no-harvest counterfactual combined with an incomplete market approach to aggregate over space and time—is biased. The no-harvest counterfactual method should not be adopted by greenhouse gas measurement protocols or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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We did not generate new data for this study. All information referenced and discussed in the Comment is based on the literature cited.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Brent Sohngen

  2. Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Justin S. Baker

  3. Center for Applied Economics and Strategy, RTI International, Washington, DC, USA

    Alice Favero

  4. School of Forest Resources, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA

    Adam Daigneault

Authors
  1. Brent Sohngen
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  2. Justin S. Baker
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  3. Alice Favero
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  4. Adam Daigneault
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Contributions

B.S., J.S.B., A.F. and A.D. drafted, revised and edited the text.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Brent Sohngen.

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Competing interests

All authors have published competing research; however, we do not have direct financial competing interests and code for our model is available publicly. Our work has been funded by various US government agencies. We do not anticipate this paper to have any effect on whether that research continues.

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Sohngen, B., Baker, J.S., Favero, A. et al. Carbon implications of wood harvesting and forest management. Nature 646, E18–E19 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09380-6

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