This year Wood at Work took a form that – while virtual – was intimate, informal and intensely collaborative. The event engaged our Wood at Work community in helping to challenge, define, and expand the fundamentals of “sustainable wood”, with a focus on practical solutions for city governments, as well as design professionals, related industries, producers and consumers across different demographics.

Panel: The Carbon Credentials of Wood in Construction

This panel presented a deep-dive into the "net carbon benefits" of wood for long-life construction (mass timber etc.) and was led by five of the world’s top minds on this topic: Chad Oliver, Galina Churkina, Tim Searchinger, William Keeton, and Peter Pinchot. The panelists presented different models for understanding the carbon profile of wood, including a variety of forest impact models and the concerns around increasing wood demand on the world's forests.

The goal of this session was to co-create a more robust carbon profile of wood before it is incorporated into a building (i.e. the focus was less on the "displacement carbon value" of wood, and more on how wood "shows-up" to the building site: Is it net zero? Carbon negative? Carbon positive? And on what basis can we make these claims? We asked the panelists: What are the three most important systems components (elements, relationships, feedback loops) that will define the carbon profile of wood in the coming decade?

To answer these questions, the panelists presented the following:

Galina Churkina: How to make the transition to timber cities sustainable? (slides)
Galina Churkina discussed how to balance the carbon benefits of both forests and the wood demands of timber cities. She detailed the challenges of climate change-induced forest disturbances in complex forest feedback systems, and the need for proper forest management. She proposed that adaptive and dynamic timber manufacturing processes that diversified inputs and outputs could better meet the challenges of climate change on forests.

Tim Searchinger: When does harvesting wood for construction benefit from a climate perspective?
Tim Searchinger addressed projections of vastly rising demand for timber in construction and different scenarios that might counteract the net carbon benefits of forests or work in synergy with them. He noted that high-yield plantation forests may in theory be able to meet this demand, however there could be significant trade-offs in terms of important factors such as biodiversity and competition for other land use. In closing, he proposed a number of key factors in considering the climate benefits of wood use (such as forest growth rates and harvest efficiencies) and drew comparisons to the bioenergy debate to caution proponents from similar logical biases.

Bill Keeton: Climate Friendly Forestry: Four tests for durable wood products (slides)
Bill Keeton considered four tests that durable wood products must pass in order to create net climate benefit. Of these wood products, he asked if they complemented other climate solutions, if their production stabilized or increased net carbon stocks, if they were part of multi-functional forest management strategy, and if their production might help forests become more resilient to future climate disturbances.

Chad Oliver: Sustaining Forests While Saving CO2 with Wood Products (slides)
Chad Oliver considered the carbon benefits of building with wood over other construction materials like steel and concrete, and touched on the delicate balance between increased demand for wood and the risk of increased deforestation. He proposed instituting a carbon credit market associated with all building products to incentivize construction with sustainable wood.

Peter Pinchot: Reversing Deforestation and Providing Negative Carbon Wood Products (slides)
Peter Pinchot discussed connections between the emerging green building market and tropical forest conservation, in the context of rapid deforestation in Ecuador. He argued that a conservation-focused forest product economy can create an incentive to keep forests there, by cultivating a well-paid local workforce relying on forest management, and by employing product design that intentionally uses a diversified selection of wood species.

Session: Sustainable Wood for Cities

Wood at Work has gathered us around the topic of sustainable wood over the past 6 years, and we now have an additional focus from our Cities4Forests network. Our W@W Sustainable Wood Specifications Working Group and Cities4Forests have worked together to develop the Sustainable Wood for Cities guide. This tool is designed to assist cities in making sustainable-goal-aligned decisions on wood procurement and related policy across a wide variety of wood uses in urban infrastructure: benches, boardwalks, bridges and buildings.

In this session we invited participants to explore, challenge, and give feedback on the guide in small breakout groups. We invite the larger Wood at Work community to participate in the co-creation of this important tool that can be used by cities around the world to promote the goals of sustainable wood sourcing, forest conservation, and climate action.

Presentation of Sustainable Wood For Cities.