Accelerating change in a climate emergency
Gary Newman discusses the complex challenges associated with the net zero carbon agenda across different stakeholders, highlights steps already taken in Wales, and proposes calls for action to the industry which he believes will remain relevant over the next few years.
Planting trees and building with wood are two largely uncontroversial measures to help the world stay below 2.0°C of warming, but preferably below 1.5°C as per the 2015 Paris Agreement. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that while staying below 1.5°C is technically feasible, it would take “unprecedented transformation of all aspects of society”.1
Looking across wood and construction, this article explores how such transformation can be brought about in reality. It builds upon an article I wrote for this publication in 2020,2 which sought to describe the challenge. I will focus largely on Wales, but the content is also relevant to those involved in the other regions of the UK.
Transformation challenges around the net zero carbon agenda
In our context, some examples of the transformation challenge are:
1. FORESTRY: Creating forests means a change in land use, which in turn means a change in rural employment requiring new training and skills. Furthermore, if we are to grow the timber that we need to decarbonise our built environment, the forest industry will need what could be called a societal ‘licence to operate’ enabling what will mostly be coniferous trees to be grown, managed and cut down at increasing scale. As with food, so with timber – society must re-evaluate the nature of the compromise between land use and the need to meet our resource needs in the context of increasingly unstable international supply chains. Over the past few years, we can see that the words ‘resilience’ and ‘adaptation’ have started to sit alongside the more familiar ‘sustainability’ and ‘decarbonisation’.
2. CONSTRUCTION: building more widely with timber in an industry that’s become comfortable with steel, concrete, and plastic requires a much deeper understanding of wood properties than is typically found across the construction professions and trades. For example, all the UK structural engineers with expertise in timber could probably gather in a small house party. Carpenters are not taught about forestry or wood science. Planning authorities still largely >>
“Over the past few years, we can see that the words ‘resilience’ and ‘adaptation’ have started to sit alongside the more familiar ‘sustainability’ and ‘decarbonisation’. ”
encourage estates with parking for two cars, with layouts, typologies and aesthetics based on the past rather than on the needs of the future. More recently, in the post-Grenfell market, UK insurers, lenders and warranty providers view timber construction as higher risk, creating a significant barrier to developers. However, rapid transformation implies innovation and change. This is in direct tension with conservative industries that view change as risk.
3. MANUFACTURING: Sandwiched in between the trees and construction we have manufacturing. By comparison with forestry and construction, this is a more pragmatic part of the system less bound up in tradition. However, in the UK we have almost no engineered wood product manufacturing and very little use of home-grown sawnwood in the construction sector. UK governments have not considered timber an industrial material worthy of policy interventions. The current Westminster policy document, The England Trees Action Plan 2021-2024, astonishingly makes only a passing and relatively superficial reference to the role of timber as an essential raw material. Maybe this is because Britain has viewed the world as its hypermarket, with wood products that can be picked off the shelf as required. The ecological, climatic and political instabilities that have started to appear make this behaviour very unsafe, and in a world predicted to stabilise at a resource-hungry global population of between 10 and 11 billion before the end of this century, this approach will increasingly have a moral dimension.
System change for climate mitigation
Effectively, even the seemingly relatively small task of developing UK forest industries involves buy-in from almost
all aspects of our society. As the holder of two climate change mitigation solutions in trees (carbon removal) and timber construction (carbon storage), the sector will need to adjust to being in the spotlight and increasingly embrace both the responsibility as well as the opportunity. Working in sectoral silos or in market isolation no longer seems appropriate.
We should say at this point that Woodknowledge Wales is a system change membership alliance. We are a for public good community benefit society with a vision for Wales as a high value low carbon forest nation. Our purpose is to catalyse and accelerate change in a way that ethically addresses the environmental challenges and at the same time improves the lives of people in Wales.
In Wales, policies are starting to emerge from the climate change ministry (which has broad responsibilities for the natural and built environments) that >>
Timber structures
Sustainability
show the Government understands the critically important role that forestry and timber can play. For example:
• A timber industrial strategy is under development which focuses on the critical function of trees to provide a resource for society as well as being an environmental good.
• Social housing policy now encourages the use of timber and the measurement and reduction of embodied carbon.
• Encouraged by Welsh Government, 17 Welsh local authorities and Welsh housing associations are currently procuring a delivery partner to design a standardised net zero carbon social house to be manufactured by a geographically diffuse Welsh timber manufacturing sector and rolled out across Wales.
• The Welsh Government is proactively encouraging strategically important timber manufacturing industries to develop and locate in Wales, to produce such products as woodfibre insulation, glulam and timber windows.
• A target to plant 43,000 hectares of new forest by 2030 and 180,000 hectares by 2050 (more than a 50% increase in Welsh forest area from 14% of land area to 21%) enabled by a substantial increase in grant support and a focus upon overcoming the regulatory hurdles.
Calls for action to accelerate incremental change
Taken within the context of Wales being a grazing nation and a steel nation, this is certainly a radical set of policies that we enthusiastically support and are helping to implement. But policies alone are insufficient to lead to rapid and transformative change. Policies don’t plant trees, process wood or build houses. People do. We believe that things can move fastest when organisations involved in delivery work together to solve problems in the spirit of collaboration and shared interest.
Woodknowledge Wales’ role is to work with its cross-sectoral membership alliance of housing providers, architects, manufacturers, sawmillers and forest managers to help articulate the issues and co-create solutions at the coalface of application. This is a bottom-up approach to help organisations respond effectively to the ambitions of current Welsh policy. This means we focus on the practical barriers that our members and networks face – whether that’s in building with wood, manufacturing timber products, or growing the kinds of trees that industry needs.
There are rarely simple answers, but there are lots of good examples of what works that we can amplify through workshops, events and the publication of guidance. For us, the transformation needed is best delivered through the articulation of what needs to be done and then delivered by accelerating incremental change. n
Growing trees
In terms of afforestation, farmers understand grazing, but trees are relatively new-fangled. How can we achieve such ambitious tree planting targets when many Welsh landowners see trees as either a threat to a way of life or a sign of failure? Furthermore, the short-term tenancy arrangement of many farmers means that they are effectively excluded from the ability to make long-term strategic decisions to change the use of land.
Find out more about how we are working with farmers in our series of guidance notes and videos that provide practical information for farmers and other landowners interested in investing in forestry.
Growing homes
In terms of housing, we are beginning to overcome the lack of knowledge about how to use timber well and are increasingly using home-grown timber for the structural frame.
Find out how we are working with housing providers and our key findings around how a timber supply chain based on local forestry products can support the delivery of low carbon social housing in Wales.
Growing manufacture
In terms of manufacturing, we’re co-developing timber systems for housing that can achieve zero whole life carbon impact and we’re looking at alternative procurement options to facilitate their delivery.
Find out more about our approach to zero carbon timber homes.
About the author
Gary Newman CEO Woodknowledge Wales
References
1. IPCC report, Global Warming of 1.5°C, https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15
2. Woodknowledge Wales article in TRADA Timber Industry Yearbook 2020
