WOOD FOR THOUGHT
A Practical Framework for Comparing and Selecting Sustainable Wood More than ever, clients and consumers want to know about the impacts of their material choices – and it’s about time! At this fall’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, the Cities4Forests team presented the Sustainable Timber District. Here’s an overview of the principles and projects that were included. Scott Francisco
We are witnessing a renaissance of a building material that is strong, light, flexible, lasts hundreds of years and benefits both physical and mental human health. During production, it can restore natural landscapes, create habitats for plants and animals and employ millions of people. Essentially a solar-powered 3D printer, the “technology” pulls CO2 from the atmosphere and converts it into a variety of building materials that can replace polluting alternatives such as concrete, aluminum, steel or plastic. This technology is the tree. Cutting-edge engineering developments now allow us to build wood structures taller than 25 storeys that can be erected faster, at less cost and just as safely as their concrete and steel counterparts, while sequestering millions of tons of carbon instead of producing it. New perspectives on traditional and Indigenous knowledge offer synergies between urban and rural communities, and new sourcing relationships with sustainable wood producers make it possible to procure “good” wood that protects forests and communities, locally and globally. But wood isn’t foolproof. Last year, IKEA came under fire for manufacturing some of its furniture with illegally harvested timber from a Ukrainian supplier. At the height of the pandemic, increasing lumber prices fuelled illegal old-growth “tree poaching” in B.C., and newly completed benches in Oslo were removed after public outcry ensued with questions about the source of FSC-certified tropical wood. These stories are not uncommon. Increasingly, specifiers are required to know where – and how – wood is produced. Choosing wood that actually delivers benefits to the climate and forests can be challenging. It requires understanding the 10
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supply chain, how each forest is managed, how communities are impacted and in what ways the climate has been altered by consumer choices. Currently, this is very difficult to measure given the massive complexity of global supply chains which have sought to produce efficiency often at the expense of transparency. As an architect who loves wood and forests, I have been wrestling with this challenge for decades, bringing hundreds of forest conservationists, designers, researchers, clients and industry leaders to the table over the past decade to better understand what might make wood truly “sustainable.”
HOW DO WE GET THERE?
It has quickly become apparent that we need some kind of industry tool for assessing all of the various wood choices available to us. It is not enough to simply look at the final certification and sequestered carbon in a wood choice. What’s required is a deep dive into all of the possible criteria linked to the material. The main challenge with determining whether the wood used by a project is sustainable is that it depends on the availability of information. Also, we need to be asking the right questions to get the right answers about whatever wood might be chosen. The capacity to identify the right wood choice for a project rests in our ability to pin down the term “sustainable.” We need to know where our wood is coming from, how the forest it came from has been managed, how communities are impacted and in what ways the climate has been altered by our choices. Sustainability should be assessed based on forest impact, socioeconomic integrity, carbon storage and life-cycle