Voices of Forestry presents analysis and insight from people working all across the forestry sector – and beyond. In this issue, Paul Brannen, a former MEP and now director of public affairs at the European Confederation of Woodworking Industries and the European Organisation of Sawmill Industry, outlines the core arguments in his landmark book, Timber! How Wood Can Help Save the World from Climate Breakdown.

IN 2022, I was appointed as a visiting professor at Newcastle University Business School. The one-year term began with an inaugural lecture which I delivered on the subject ‘Timber! Innovating and growing a sustainable low-carbon economy’.

Following the lecture, two people made the point of coming up to me and saying: “Have you thought of writing these ideas down in a book?” to which the honest answer was: Yes I had, but I had done nothing about it. Their comments were the push I needed.

Working on the basis that many of the best ideas are formulated in the pub, the week following the lecture I was seated in Newcastle’s Free Trade Inn, contemplating the view of the River Tyne and self-tasked with sketching out chapter headings and content of what was ultimately to become Timber! How Wood Can Help Save the World from Climate Breakdown. 

From the start, the book was always aimed at the general reader. It was not going to be an academic tome and it was not going to be a coffee table book, full of glossy photographs of timber builds from around the world. Rather, the book would make the case accessibly for a significant increase in the use of timber and wood fibre in the built environment with the aim of driving down global carbon emissions by at least 15 per cent. In doing so, all the main questions that such an endeavour would legitimately throw up would be answered convincingly.

Roughly two years later, in June 2024, Timber! was published and was quickly awarded ‘Book of the Week’ status by Scotland’s Architecture Bookshop RIAS. 

The initial draft, when completed, raised two main issues that I needed to grapple with. The chapter on using wood fibre to make insulation began with me presuming that wood-fibre insulation would de facto have a low level of embodied carbon and a fossil fuel-based insulation a de facto high level. But as I dug deeper it became clearer that, while this might indeed be the case, it was not intrinsically so. Why? Because manufacturing a wood-fibre insulation can be a wet process, like making paper, and therefore to finish the product you need to dry it and, if your energy source for this heat is fossil fuel, you will be manufacturing a product with a large carbon footprint. Conversely, you could be making a fossil fuel-based insulation such as rock/stone wool with a green energy source e.g. hydro-electricity. If so, your product’s embodied carbon could drop considerably from similar products where the heat source is a fossil fuel.

Consequently, the chapter needed a major rewrite. However, the overriding argument that, from the perspective of tackling climate change, a wood-fibre insulation is better than a fossil fuel-based insulation still stood. Why? Because nature-based insulation such as wood fibre stores carbon (carbon removal) and fossil fuel-based insulation e.g. polystyrene, rock/stone wool etc are incapable of storing carbon (no removal benefit). Yes, my sigh of relief was audible.

Second, the chapter on fire and timber builds was the most difficult to finalise as each expert who saw the text had suggestions and improvements to make. After five revisions I decided to draw a line and the final text is as it is, although I am sure if a sixth expert had been consulted it would have been tweaked again!

The central theme of the book, to which I return again and again, is that trees growing in the forest sequester carbon (a good thing). On felling, the carbon is not released but remains stored within the timber (a good thing). This storage can be continued for decades if the timber is used to make a product for the built environment (a good thing). In so doing the timber can substitute for a carbon-intensive alternative such as concrete, steel, brick or block (a good thing). It is the combination of these three activities – sequestration, storage and substitution – reproduced repeatedly on a growing scale and at an increasingly fast pace that can deliver a 15-per-cent reduction in global carbon emissions – at least. 

I am pleased to say this proposed trajectory is gathering increasing support. However, at the same time, it increasingly throws up the biggest of all the questions – is there enough sustainable wood to facilitate its increased use in the built environment? This question is even ‘bigger’ in that the wider bioeconomy, which is growing in leaps and bounds, is also requesting more and more woody biomass as a feedstock. Consequently, answering this perfectly legitimate question in a comprehensive and convincing way takes up more space in the book than any other issue. The answer comes in many parts, including: harvesting closer to the net annual increment, planting more forests, growing more plantations, working towards ten per cent trees on farms in an agroforestry setting, increasing material efficiency, greater recycling and upcycling of wood, building-on-top with timber, reducing demolition, sourcing timber once again from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine (but only when Russia’s illegal occupation of Ukraine ends) and optimising every log via X-ray and scanning.

Timber! has been well received by critics Timber! has been well received by critics (Image: Stock)

I am pleased to say that the reviews to date agree that Timber! is a good, accessible read; you do not need to be a qualified forester, architect or engineer to understand it. For instance, Canadian academic, architect and author Lloyd Alter said: “Brannen has written a sunny, optimistic and positive – relentlessly positive – look at timber. I have some reservations and concerns, but this is a book we needed, that anyone can understand, and that will change the way many people look at wood.”

Equally important, does it work as an advocacy tool to further increase the use of timber in construction? Here the jury is out, but this is where you step in. 

Please buy it, read it and if you think it is convincing send a copy to the politician, decision maker, builder, engineer, farmer, academic, student etc who you think needs winning over to the cause of Timber! and in due course we will find out.

Timber! How Wood Can Help Save the World from Climate Breakdown by Paul Brannen: www.agendapub.com/page/detail/timber/?k=9781788217354

DISCLAIMER: Our columns are a platform for writers to express their personal opinions. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the writers’ own organisations or of Forestry Journal.