2 - How timber can decarbonize the built environment

Summary

Fact: per square metre buildings have the potential capacity to store more carbon than forests.

It is difficult to find people who do not like trees. Trees have cheerleaders across the social classes; young and old, rich and poor, left and right. There is a vocal minority who believe that trees should be left well alone. What, they ask, is the environmental gain of chopping them down and bringing them out of the forest? Well, the answer is that when it comes to tackling climate change our forests are only half the story – and hence only half the answer. We can build with wood, wood that stores carbon and substitutes for much more carbon-intensive building materials. Without doubt wood is special. As one of the champions of building with wood, Vancouver-based architect Michael Green, has put it: “Wood is the most technologically advanced material I can build with. It just happens to be that Mother Nature holds the patent on it and we are not comfortable with that. But that's the way it should be: nature's fingerprints in the built environment”.

We have been building houses from wood for thousands of years. Most European cities still have a few timber-framed buildings dating back 300 years or more. York in the UK is a good example. Here you will find The Shambles – a street of medieval timber-framed buildings with a strong Harry Potter feel to them. Strasbourg, home of one of the two seats of the European Parliament – and somewhere I travelled to every month for five years as an MEP – has some fine examples of old timber-framed buildings (Figure 2.1). Some of these were carefully rebuilt after the Second World War but to the untrained eye look as old as those that were not damaged.

When these buildings were erected, they had only one purpose – that of providing shelter, a home. However, although unknown at the time, they were also safely storing the carbon that the timber had sequestrated (soaked up) when it was growing as a tree in the forest.