Mainstreaming Wood Construction

Switzerland has an ambitious "net-zero carbon goal" by 2050, requiring drastic reduction of emission. Timber engineering products and construction concepts have immense potential to reduce these emissions. Building with biomaterials se-questers carbon in forests, stores carbon in long-lived buildings, substitutes carbon-intense materials such as concrete or steel, and reduces energy-related emissions in the built environment.

The Joint Initiative "Mainstreaming Wood Construction" addresses forest dynamics and production, material use and flow scenarios, innovative building products, life cycle analysis and cost modelling. It aims to identify the key leverage points in the value chain to scale up wood for construction and to develop ecologically optimal Swiss wood use scenarios.

Substantial expertise in the Swiss construction bioeconomy is currently confined to a small market share. Leveraging opportunities to grow this share is constrained by the need to enact multiple interdependent interventions across value chains. Wholesale transition to a sustainable construction bioeconomy implies radically different sociotechnical regimes. These create new challenges relating to demand for wood, new conceptual/operational outlooks, cost efficiency, changing skills sets, displaced environmental impacts, and (potentially) socio-cultural conflicts.

Aim of the project

This joint initiative aims to explore the crucial interdependencies of the dynamics of raw material supply and demand, as well as the resulting international trade flows and their impacts. Based on a deeper analysis of the types of wood that can be grown under changing climatic conditions, in terms of the required material properties and their sorting and standardisation, and through creative design concepts combined with advanced 3D modelling, the use of wood can be holistically optimised.