Could wooden building be a solution to climate change?

Very interesting article. Quote:<p>Many pine trees in managed forests, such as the European spruce, take roughly 80 years to reach maturity, being net absorbers of carbon during those years of growth – but once they reach maturity, they shed roughly as much carbon through the decomposition of needles and fallen branches as they absorb. As was the case in Austria in the 1990s, plummeting demand for paper and wood saw huge swathes of managed forests globally fall into disuse. Rather than return to pristine wilderness, these monocrops cover forest floors in acidic pine needles and dead branches. Canada&#x27;s great forests for example have actually emitted more carbon than they absorb since 2001, thanks to mature trees no longer being actively felled. Arguably, the best form of carbon sequestration is to chop down trees: to restore our sustainable, managed forests, and use the resulting wood as a building material. Managed forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) typically plant two to three trees for every tree felled – meaning the more demand there is for wood, the greater the growth in both forest cover and CO2-hungry young trees.

If you are seriously considering using building materials for carbon storage the best would be bamboo. It grows incredibly fast so that it soaks up carbon fast. However we would need more R&amp;D to make the manufacture of bamboo building materials more environmentally friendly. Currently this Involves just soaking he bamboo in a lot of glue.

For the purposes of storing carbon, I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;ll get away from the fact that a large amount the carbon from fossil fuels that we have burned will likely have to be stored under ground again eventually. I find it strange to think about wooden buildings made out of pine; pine is an invasive species in Southern Africa. The effect of for example eucalyptus on the topsoil layer is as bad as full scale agricultural tilling.<p>There is an argument that agriculture is a better future for this part of the world and there would certainly need to be better options here than wooden buildings. Maybe some sort of carbon polymer concrete mixture?

Most small residential buildings in NA are already using relatively climate friendly dimensional lumber so the question is, are large wooden building a solution for climate change. The answer looks like yes, but there are a lot of toxic pollutants involved in engineered wood products, the kind of large wood members needed in large scale construction. I haven&#x27;t found much research into the subject, a lot of existing literature is from the industry. Partly because it might genuinely be the defacto future building material, partly because the market is ready since sand scarcity is going to be a problem for concrete in the future.

We are currently building a home made of cross-laminated timber as inner walls. The outer wall are covered by a wood construction that is filled with wood fiber to insulate.<p>The carpenter ordered the walls in Austria and they set everything up in three days. The outer walls and the roof were pre-fabricated too and delivered in parts. Really crazy.<p>The house smells pretty good with all the wood, let&#x27;s see how the climate will be when we live in it.

The understanding that &quot;captured carbon&quot; is mostly just another word for &quot;wood&quot; is sadly rare.

I don&#x27;t see anything surprising.<p>To remove carbon from atmosphere it must be sequestered. Sequestration means it is no longer available to go back to the atmosphere. It means it can no longer be part of cycle of life, it must be removed and prevented from getting back in the cycle.<p>The reason we have more carbon in atmosphere is not that we have felled trees but that we have dug out a bunch of carbon (coal, oil, gas) that for a long time was not taking part in the cycle.<p>What is surprising is that supposedly intelligent people still don&#x27;t get the basic facts right.

Also briefly discussed on a recent episode of 99% invisible: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;episode&#x2F;built-on-sand&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;episode&#x2F;built-on-sand&#x2F;</a>

Also there is ventilation&#x2F;cooling aspect for wooden houses which works favourably in tropical climates, especially when used in roofing. Not sure about its effect on colder climates.

I believe wooden building of the sort described in the article can be a solution to climate change, in the normally understood usage of the word solution, if combined with a time machine.

Hemp?<p>Long history of industrial usages (before prohibition)<p>An excellent material for engineering.<p>Grows anywhere, fast, a good greenifier.

The use of wood in building has some clear advantages, for sure, particularly as engineered timber improves.<p>At the same time, there are also issues of robustness to consider. If you&#x27;re only building a house that might last for a few decades, you need to consider what happens to the building materials at the end of its useful life. More than that, depending on your environment, you need to consider risks that might cause either a premature end to that useful life or a degradation of performance over time.<p>For example, here in the UK, we don&#x27;t get a lot of really bad storms of the kind that central America sees, but we do get storms strong enough to cause major structural damage from time to time, and the rate is expected to increase for a while due to the changing environmental conditions. The kinds of insulated panels used for a lot of timber frame construction today have many good points, but being about as robust as tissue paper in the face of fast-moving debris flying around outside your house in a bad storm is not one of them. There&#x27;s not much point planning the environmental credentials of a new building over, say, a 50-60 year assumed lifetime if in reality the expected time before being seriously damaged in a bad storm is only half that.<p>You also have to consider the possibilities for timber elements changing shape over time, which in turn can reduce the overall thermal efficiency of a building, allow damaging pests to get in, increase sound transmission, or even in severe cases reduce fire containment or compromise structural integrity entirely. We have very changeable seasons here: as it happens, we&#x27;re reaching all-time high temperatures of nearly 40C as I&#x27;m writing this, but we also have lows in the same areas that can push towards -10C or even -20C. That&#x27;s a lot of expansion and contraction, and while again engineered timber has significant advantages over solid planks and the like, you do have to consider these kinds of issues as well.<p>Again, none of this is to say that using more timber in our construction doesn&#x27;t have some big advantages. We just need to be a little cautious, because there might also be risks, and so far we have relatively little experience with some of these newer timber-based construction techniques to fully evaluate them.

There is not single isolated solution to climate change. A wooden house can be a solution if you have abundant wood nearby, which is not the case everywhere. The problem is the industrialization of everything and the urban consumerist way of life.<p>Ikea furniture is made of wood yet they&#x27;re terrible for the environment because the wood comes from far away, is usually assembled in China, filled of fire-repellent chemicals (among others) and is not very strong because it&#x27;s low-quality wood (made from throw-away pieces hacked together with glue). So your piece of furniture brings a lot of pollution and is not gonna last, compared to hand-crafted furniture (out of real wood).<p>The same goes for housing. People have been building houses out of straw and mud for thousands of years. Where you have wood, you&#x27;ll build a solid base structure out of it and make big houses. When you don&#x27;t, you&#x27;ll just make a smaller one (&lt; 15m²). Made a few myself, and these houses are way better than concrete houses: &lt; 1000€ to build, fresh in summer, warm in winter..<p>But the ultimate solution is to stop the madness of trying to pile up people in huge metal&#x2F;concrete towers. I too love the comfort of the city and meeting many people but it is not a sustainable way of life and will never be. We should stop listening to these &quot;Green capitalism&quot; and other profiting vampires, and build our actual autonomy before this industrial civilization collapses.

There is no solution to climate change. Climate change will occur, whatever we do. Human activity is polluting, it&#x27;s inevitable. To avoid climate change, we should have listened to the Club of Rome, in 1972, when they published &quot;the limits to growth&quot;. We should have installed a Malthusian politic, to avoid high birth rates. Now it is much too late.