Replace other materials with wood

Using wood as a building material is climate-friendly and sustainable. Wood products are unique. They come from a natural, renewable, sustainable resource. The carbon they contain remains stored for the duration of the product’s lifetime, until it decays, or is burnt. The longer the wood product is used, the longer the period of time the carbon is stored within it. A global increase in the use of industrial wood products would increase the amount of carbon stored.

When it comes to constructing homes and buildings, wood has the lowest energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions of any commonly used building material. As well as being climate friendly and sustainable, wood is a good insulator, so we can also reduce our energy needs. Designing future buildings to use more wood instead of concrete, plastic and steel could result in a significant drop in greenhouse gas emissions.

We can help reduce carbon dioxide emissions by replacing products whose manufacture is associated with higher levels of carbon dioxide emissions with sustainably produced wood and paper. We can recover the energy stored in wood residues and end-of-life wood products by using them as a fossil fuel substitute.