Forestry Embodied Carbon Methodology

Wood is increasingly used in construction, especially as mass timber in large commercial, institutional, and multifamily buildings, and has gained a reputation as a low-carbon alternative to steel and concrete framing. Current building industry environmental life cycle assessment practices assume that forest operations are carbon-neutral at the landscape scale and ignore the role that timber construction has to play in providing an incentive for increased carbon sequestration in forests through forest management practices that exceed business as usual. This paper proposes a methodology to quantify the impact of selecting "climate-friendly" wood to recognize the unique role of forest products in buildings.