Wood is not the climate-friendly building material often claimed.

We are pleased to announce that the next ROC&TOK webinar will take place on  May 2nd, 2024 at 3PM CEST/Paris Time and will be one hour long (30-minute presentation + 30-minute interaction). The registration for this webinar is free.

Speaker: Tim Searchinger, Senior Research Scholar, Princeton University and Technical Director for Agriculture, Forestry and Ecosystems at the World Resources Institute

Hosts: Dr Prannoy Suraneni, University of Miami, United States and Prof. Karen Scrivener, EPFL, Switzerland

Title : Wood is not the climate-friendly building material often claimed.

To reduce the emissions from new building construction, many argue that the world should shift to “mass timber.” In the Carbon Costs of Global Wood Harvests (Nature 2023) and an associated report, Searchinger and others found that claims for the climate advantages of wood were based on different variations of the idea that harvesting wood is carbon neutral. This means that most the carbon in wood that is lost from a forest and not stored in buildings as a result of harvesting and using wood is not counted as emissions. The same approach underlies claims for the climate benefits of using wood for bioenergy. This talk will discuss how the climate effects of harvesting wood should be counted and the resulting implications for using wood for construction and other purposes.