Benefits of Building with Wood | Wood High Rise and Carbon Analysis

When I think of cities, I think of sterile environments full of concrete, brick, and glass structures that tower towards the sky. When I think of wood structures, I become more whimsical, imagining cozy log cabins and adventurous treehouses. Recently, these two worlds have begun to merge and architects and planners are asking themselves: why can’t we have high-rises in our cities that are built out of wood?

CBC’s popular environmental newsletter, What on Earth, has highlighted the numerous benefits of making high-rises out of wood. To begin, it would greatly reduce emissions linked to steel and cement production by diverting consumption towards an alternative building material. Furthermore, as wood stores carbon in its development, it would also provide temporary relief by delaying carbon from entering the atmosphere. By replacing carbon-intensive materials such as concrete, wood buildings could double their contribution to lowering CO2 emissions (AustrianproH; Smedley T).

With a growing interest in wood, and the emerging benefits to the environment, it becomes easy to understand why new products are being invented and building codes changed to make more wood builds a reality.

At Biomimicry Frontiers, wood structures have always been on our radar due to their proximity to the natural world. In Bengaluru, India, we are currently assisting a client in the design of a fully sustainable residential home. Our goal is to go beyond net-zero and create a net positive home that contributes to its ecosystem. We've mapped out the wind, water, and solar flows to maximize harnessing the free energy of the space. As a result, we were able to design a water, soil, and agricultural strategy to ensure the home is completely off-grid. The client's dream for their home is to have it function as efficiently as a forest and as a result, we performed a carbon analysis to determine how much CO2 it would sequester because of the plants and agriculture system we’re helping design. We looked at both operation emissions as well as embedded emissions in the materials and transportation used for the design. Going further, we are also measuring the noise and air pollution it could absorb, and even how big a storm event it could handle to imagine the design being fully integrated with its environment.

Although cutting down trees is never an ideal solution, we did our best to consider all alternatives. We contacted the lumber yard, researched the harvesting practices and studied the carbon footprint of concrete vs timber, concluding that even taking into consideration the transportation costs of timber to India, and using local concrete, the embedded carbon for concrete would still be significantly higher. Our analysis did not even include the impact that mining has on ecosystems and their ability to regenerate, further cementing our belief that wood was the better alternative.  

One of the problems we’ve encountered when studying carbon emissions for our clients is putting boundaries on what can feasibly be measured while maintaining the priorities of the client and what is truly important to them and their future vision. Through an environmental lens, we know that - depending on the location - mining for cement does considerably more damage to an ecosystem than harvesting trees, which means that the site takes longer to regenerate and therefore, absorb CO2. Defining boundaries to what is acceptable is a frequent roadblock to zero-carbon strategies. Given our clients' priorities, we concluded that even with the cost of transportation, lumber was a better solution in terms of CO2 emissions.

Changes to the rules along with new innovation and technology surrounding wood builds are exciting and showcase the changing priorities of citizens. Adding more nature to the city should always be a priority, so why not add wood structures to our city environments to remind us to step outside into nature to take in its beauty. To honour that beauty, and in an acknowledgement of our responsibility and to reciprocate the gift of trees that will be used to construct this home, a donation was made to the Nature Conservancy of Canada. 

[1] AustrianproH. Wood and Climate. Wooddays.https://www.wooddays.eu/en/woodclimate/ 

[2] Smedley T. Could wooden buildings be a solution to climate change? BBC Future. 2019 Jul 25.  https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190717-climate-change-wooden-architecture-concrete-global-warming
[3] The Ecology of Timber Utilization Life Cycle Assessment Carbon Management etc. Arno Frühwald, Department of Wood Science and Technology University of Hamburg, Germany:https://drive.google.com/open?id=1UlNF7auhp15tdtO6CSurPEyFIwyG-BmN