If all goals are met, 2030 will be a great year for forests around the world. Why? Two important treaties were agreed upon in the last weeks.
G20 Summit (Rome): To mitigate climate change, the G20 leaders formulated the ambitious goal of planting 1 trillion trees by 2030.
COP26 (Glasgow): The countries owning 85% of the planet's forests agreed to stopping deforestation by 2030.
Enforcing reforestation while ending deforestation are important steps to reaching a positive climate balance. Sir David Attenborough puts it like this:
Wherever we restore the wild, it will help capture carbon and bring back balance to our planet.
Wood stores carbon
The closely related goals from G20 Summit and COP26 bear in mind the ability of trees to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) and store carbon in their wood. This is why wood is considered a "climate-positive" material.
So how about storing this carbon in buildings, constructed using wood from sustainably managed forests?
Sustainable forest management
🌲♻️ Sustainable forest management ensures the balance between production rate and regeneration capacity that will sustain the ecological, economic and social functions of these ecosystems, both now and in the future. Each year, more wood grows back in European forests than is removed.
Why wood construction protects our climate
The construction sector today accounts for 35% of emissions from global economic activities (Hurmekoski, E. 2017). Of course, we do need to provide for the growing population, especially in cities.
Planting billions of trees strengthens our forests and provides us with the raw material timber, which - when replacing traditional materials such as concrete and steel - reduces greenhouse gas emissions in the construction sector.
Building a Second Forest
To close the sustainability circle, alongside with constructing wooden buildings that store carbon, we must plant new trees, which - in their growth - sequester new carbon. This way, we keep the forests growing and healthy and create a 'second carbon-storing forest' of timber buildings.