About

Brent Sohngen is a distinguished professor at The Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES), recognized with the highest faculty honor of Distinguished University Professor. He is a faculty member in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics and is internationally recognized for his research in forestry economics and nature-based approaches to addressing environmental and resource challenges. His work examines how forests and land use contribute to improved environmental outcomes and resource management, utilizing global forest and land-use modeling that accounts for real-world market responses. Sohngen’s research has demonstrated the critical role of forests in long-term environmental sustainability and has informed policy analysis both in the United States and internationally, including contributions to the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s National Climate Assessment. His models and datasets have been used by agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to evaluate forest carbon sinks and land-use change at national and global scales. Since joining Ohio State in 1996, Sohngen has also been committed to teaching and mentorship, helping to shape interdisciplinary programs that connect sustainability, energy, and environmental economics with real-world policy and workforce needs. Through The Ohio State University Extension, he leads a webinar series translating environmental science into practical guidance for farmers, land managers, and public agencies.

Research topics

• Ecology
• Economics
• Natural resource economics
• Environmental science
• Agroforestry
• Geography
• Business
• Physical geography
• Environmental resource management
• Biology

Selected publications

• How much of the forest sink is passive? Case of the United States

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2026-01-20 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Over time, carbon sequestered in temperate forests has increased, but the relative effects of passive and active drivers remain unclear. This study uses plot-level data to disentangle the contributions of six drivers (temperature, precipitation, CO 2 , management, age composition, and area) to these increases in 14 forest groups of the conterminous United States. From 2005 to 2022, the passive drivers (CO 2 , temperature, and precipitation) increased live tree carbon (C) by 66 teragrams (Tg) C y −1 with CO 2 fertilization contributing most of the change. Among the anthropogenic drivers, declining forest area reduced live tree C by 31 Tg C y −1 while tree planting increased it by 23 Tg C y −1 . Changes in age composition, driven by both passive traits and anthropogenic choices, increased live tree C by 89 Tg C y −1 . By quantifying the share of removals attributable to passive uptake, this approach enables nations with national forest inventories to better utilize their forests to meet net-zero requirements.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Forgotten Forests and Corporate Climate Commitments: Scaling Sustainability with Nature-Based Solutions

  Sustainability · 2026-04-23

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  This paper assesses the role of nature-based solutions as a way to scale sustainability goals, focusing on the use of carbon credits in voluntary corporate climate commitments. To accomplish this, we adapt the DICE23 model by incorporating a demand function for voluntary corporate carbon abatement and by including the costs of supplying nature-based and non-CO2 credits to that market. Through scenario analysis, we examine how likely current and proposed new commitments are to meet 1.5 °C and 2 °C climate thresholds by 2030 and 2050 with and without the use of nature-based carbon credits. We find that the inclusion of nature-based credits would increase the probability of meeting a 2 °C threshold by 2030 by lowering costs and significantly increasing overall mitigation. A key result of this paper is that allowing companies to utilize nature-based credits to deliver on near-term mitigation targets can provide the same number of emission reductions as efforts to expand corporate commitments three-fold, but is limited to reductions in the energy sector alone. Overall, incorporating forests and other nature-based credits into corporate commitments could provide immediate and substantial climate benefits while also supporting people and nature impacts today, enabling companies to better achieve multiple social and sustainability goals simultaneously.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Where Can Federal Forest Harvests Increase? A National Spatial Assessment

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Targeting climate finance for global forests

  Nature Communications · 2025-07-11 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Comprehensive data on costs of mitigation are needed to guide the scale and distribution of climate finance to sectors and regions where it will be most cost effective. We estimate the finance required to meet regional forest-based mitigation targets, aggregated from Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Regions accounting for 70% of global forest carbon can meet their forest-based NDCs with carbon prices below $100/tonne CO2. The total investment required to meet regional targets is $20-72 billion per year by 2030. Under a global coordination scenario, in which the same level of finance is available, but mitigation takes place where it is least costly, we project twice as much mitigation in 2030 as in the upper bound NDC scenario, at the same cost. This highlights potential cost savings from increasing mitigation in regions with low-cost mitigation potential that is not reflected in current national commitments and informs the next generation of NDCs. Achieving mitigation from forests aligned with #NDCs requires $20–72 billion annually by 2030. Global coordination could double mitigation with the same level of finance, revealing major efficiency gains and informing next generation climate targets.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Global carbon storage in harvested wood products: a forest sector model inter-comparison

  Environmental Research Letters · 2025-09-29 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Forests can contribute to climate mitigation through the use of harvested wood products (HWPs), which provide a significant long-term source of carbon sequestration, replacement of more emissions-intensive building materials, and the integration of forest biomass into bioenergy systems. However, knowledge gaps remain regarding the interplay between HWP carbon flows, traditional forest product market developments, and climate policy developments incentivizing bioenergy and carbon sequestration in forestry at global scales. Information on the extent to which future policy and market developments can impact global carbon fluxes in wood product pools is needed for guiding policy design and quantifying longer-term tradeoffs between carbon stock preservation in forests and increased carbon sequestration in wood products. This study builds on projections from a forest model inter-comparison analysis of three global forest sector models to estimate the potential carbon pool in HWPs across various socioeconomic scenarios and levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) policy ambition. Further, we assess the extent to which the use of bioenergy, paired with carbon capture and storage, can enhance this forest carbon sink. In scenarios with higher levels of global timber production, even in scenarios with fossil-fueled economic growth, we see an increase in carbon stored in wood products used for housing materials, lumber, pulp, and paper products. However, climate policy stringency reduces the HWP sink, shifting C sequestration to forests and allocating harvests to bioenergy systems. The use of carbon capture and storage substantially increases the global HWP carbon sink. The results of this study highlight how economic and policy factors could impact the role of global forests in climate mitigation through carbon storage in long-lived wood products and bioenergy carbon capture and storage pools, providing new insight to policy-makers, forest managers, and forest product manufacturers on viable pathways to support the co-production of timber and carbon sinks.

  PublisherDOI

• A Global Assessment of Regional Forest Carbon Leakage

  Research Square · 2025-01-09

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Federal Timber Restrictions and Us Softwood Planting – How Forest Investments Can Reverse Carbon Leakage

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Sustainability in Boreal Forests: Does Elevated CO2 Increase Wood Volume?

  Sustainability · 2025-08-01

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  While boreal forests constitute 30% of the Earth’s forested area and are responsible for 20% of the global carbon sink, there is considerable concern about their sustainability. This paper focuses on the role of elevated CO2, examining whether wood volume in these forests has responded to increased CO2 over the last 60 years. To accomplish this, we use a rich set of wood volume measurement data from the Province of Alberta, Canada, and deploy quasi-experimental techniques to determine the effect of elevated CO2. While the few experimental studies that have examined boreal forests have found almost no effect of elevated CO2, our results indicate that a 1.0% increase in lifetime exposure to CO2 leads to a 1.1% increase in aboveground wood volume in these boreal forests. This study showcases the value of research designs that use natural settings to better account for the effects of prolonged exposure to elevated CO2. Our results should enable improved delineation of the drivers of historical changes in wood volume and carbon storage in boreal forests. In addition, when combined with other studies, these results will likely aid policymakers in designing management or policy approaches that will enhance the sustainability of forests in boreal regions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A globally relevant data-driven assessment of carbon leakage from forestry

  Environmental Research Letters · 2025-09-29 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Climate smart forestry (CSF) practices are widely recognized as efficient natural climate solutions. However, leakage accounting for these practices often relies on limited analysis and ad hoc reasoning, leading to integrity concerns and underinvestment in CSF. This study proposes a data-intensive, dynamic economic-ecological modeling approach to estimating regional CSF leakage, with global applicability. Results show how leakage varies by CSF activity, location, forest type, timeframe, and implementation rate. Critically, we show that widely cited harvest leakage estimates ignore complex forest dynamics and are a poor proxy for the metric most applicable to CSF implementation: carbon leakage. While harvest leakage is nearly always positive, our results demonstrate that some project designs can result in beneficial carbon spillovers, or negative carbon leakage. These results improve the evidence base for robust leakage quantification in CSF-based projects, enabling more accurate accounting and thereby ensuring credible climate benefits. These results are relevant in a carbon markets context, where robust leakage accounting would help safeguard the credibility of ecosystem service payments, but are also applicable to traditional, non-carbon markets conservation projects seeking to quantify carbon mitigation impacts.

  PublisherDOI

• Carbon implications of wood harvesting and forest management

  Nature · 2025-10-29 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alice Favero

  RTI International

  44 shared

• Adam Daigneault

  University of Maine

  40 shared

• Robert Mendelsohn

  Yale University

  38 shared

• Roger A. Sedjo

  30 shared

• Sara Ohrel

  North Carolina State University

  29 shared

• Thomas W. Hertel

  29 shared

• Alla Golub

  27 shared

• Justin S. Baker

  North Carolina State University

  27 shared

Awards & honors

• Distinguished University Professor at Ohio State