Safeguarding reliable sources of clean water is crucial for ecosystems, economies and community well-being.

Yet groundwater supplies are increasingly polluted as we’ve seen in Umatilla and Morrow counties and people are made sick from toxic water. Degraded water used on crops and livestock ends up in food products we feed to our families. We need cold, clean water for salmon, agriculture and municipal uses.

Globally, forests play an exceptionally important role in the water cycle, providing about 75% of the world’s accessible freshwater.

Nearly 80% of Oregon’s drinking water supply comes from forestlands. Protected forests, like the Eagle Cap Wilderness, have proven priceless in delivering a cold, clean and reliable water supply for fish, farms and domestic uses.

Forests are also vital in the fight to slow global warming and the accelerating loss of Earth’s biodiversity. Forests remove about 30% of greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere annually and provide habitats to more than half of the world’s known terrestrial plant and animal species.

The nexus of water, biodiversity and climate values provided by forests is foundational to human well-being.

Strategic forest protections can help safeguard provisioning of these critical forest ecosystem values, alongside rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists agree that we are now within a critical window of time for climate action, a period over which severe ecological disruption is expected to accelerate.

In a 2020 study, my colleagues and I determined that about half of Oregon’s land area is forested, and only 10% has strong protections such as wilderness — the lowest proportion of protected forest among the 11 Western states.

Yet Oregon has some of the most carbon-dense forests on Earth, an amazing diversity of forest ecosystems and our water supplies are heavily dependent on forested landscapes. Our Western U.S. study made clear that Oregon’s forests warranted a closer look to identify the highest priority places to protect.

In a study published in December 2022 in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, we developed an overall priority ranking at 30-meter spatial resolution from live tree aboveground carbon stocks, habitat for 544 animal species and 89 tree species and a metric of terrestrial landscape resilience. We assessed the effects of protecting the high-priority forests on surface drinking water sources across all of Oregon’s forests.

We found that only 9% of surface drinking water source areas across Oregon have strong protections like wilderness. If we protect the high priority forests identified in our study, about half of Oregon’s surface drinking water sources could be protected by 2050.

Forest habitat for birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles could increase from less than 20% protected to over 50% protected.

Aboveground biomass carbon in reserves could increase to four to six times as much as is protected now. A substantial portion of high-priority areas are roadless areas on federal public lands which could be protected now.

These are important contributions toward achieving targets aimed at helping solve some of humanity’s most pressing challenges, while conserving high-quality forest habitat and migration corridors that support hunting, fishing, gathering, hiking, and increased local and regional water security.

Most areas on federal lands would remain outside protected areas, yet these forests would also experience long-term benefits from closer proximity to protected landscapes, ensuring access to high-quality habitats for generations to come.

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