GoWood: Incentivising wood use in construction to mitigate climate change

The potential of using wood in construction to mitigate climate change, as part of a broader strategy for sustainable forest use, has been widely mooted;
wood in buildings acts as a long-term carbon store and substitutes ‘energy intensive’ materials like steel and concrete. Wood is often the material of choice in energy-efficient construction, due to its good thermal properties; hence, further GHG emissions are also avoided in the use phase of the building. Whilst there is increasing interest in using wood in larger projects it is by no means widespread and there is little evidence of increasing penetration in more everyday construction projects. Incentivizing an increase in the use of wood in construction, whilst ensuring sustainability over the entire supply chain is needed if the full potential of wood construction is to be exploited to mitigate climate change. One approach is to create instruments that:
1. enable substitution of GHG intense material leading to GHG emission avoidance;
2. incentivize enhanced carbon storage in long-lived wood products by:
i). promoting reuse and repurposing of wood to extend its useful lifetime; and
ii). enabling, at their end of life, replacement of shorter-lived wood-based products in different processes.

To do this, rigorous accounting of carbon is required since emissions occur, or are avoided, at different points along the value chain. Digital technologies, such as distributed ledgers (DLT such as blockchains), offer significant potential in this accounting process. In this first phase of the project, key stakeholders along the value chain will be identified and brought together in order to scope the use of digital tools in GHG accounting, underpinning incentive mechanisms.