Hello Green Gurus!
The Climate Smart Wood Working Group would like to give a boost to this Ecotrust initiative to support the market proliferation of mass timber with science that attributes carbon impacts to wood building products. As many of you are aware, a couple years ago, the University of Washington partnered with Ecotrust to research the correlations between forest management practices and carbon released into the atmosphere. This groundbreaking work exposed the wide range of impacts that forest management practices have on the embodied carbon performance of wood products. Wood building products can become a nature-based climate solution by storing carbon during growth and continuing to sequester carbon as a building product; alternatively, the same wood can pose a threat to the climate worse than that of concrete or steel when harvested and managed unsustainably. While this in itself may not be surprising, the lack of regionally-specific transparency in forest practices within the supply chain represents a significant barrier for designers to specify climate-smart wood.
Ecotrust has proposed a research method which combines data from the NASA Carbon Monitoring System with carbon stock change and county timber output records to create an accessible, nation-wide dataset to map what wood is ‘good’ in the entire United States. These metrics would give designers an avenue for specifying wood that contributes to nationwide carbon drawdown and identifying advocacy efforts for regulatory reform to optimize forest management for climate change mitigation. This research aims to build the tools designers need to promote healthy, local, climate-smart forestry economies and position the built environment as a climate ally.
The attached provides additional information about the study and a funding request. Please take a look and consider supporting this instrumental scientific endeavor.