The recovery agent is used to recover the:

Root certificates are the trust anchors for a PKI hierarchy and are not subject to recovery by a recovery agent.

The key in escrow is the deposited copy of a key held by a third party; the recovery agent itself is a role, not the escrowed key.

Public keys are freely distributed and never need recovery since they are not secret; recovery agents specifically target private key material.

The recovery agent holds a recovery certificate and private key that allows it to decrypt data encrypted by other users' private keys, specifically addressing scenarios where a user's private key is inaccessible or destroyed. This is distinct from key escrow in that the recovery agent credential is a purpose-built administrative keypair.