Leadership Summit for Climate, Wood, & Forests

Goal & Mission

The overarching goal of the Leadership Summit for Climate, Wood & Forests is to harness the power of the green building movement to realize wood’s potential as a climate solution. To further this goal, the gathering brought together a select group of leaders to collaborate in cross-disciplinary working groups, culminating in a participative virtual meeting centered on the following topics:

• Developing and uniting behind a holistic guiding vision for future wood use that balances the need for forest stewardship, restoration, and conservation across North America. 

• Identifying the major practical, technical, economic, and political challenges that hinder progress toward this vision. 

• Jointly developing a prioritized set of solutions – strategies, tools, informational resources, individual and collaborative actions, etc. – that address the challenges at speed and at scale. 

What’s Driving The Need?

A number of premises underlay the need for this Leadership Summit:

• Market pressure is there: Building owners, developers, and AEC professionals are increasingly committed to mitigating the climate impact of construction by reducing the embodied carbon of building materials.

• Wood can be a climate solution: Substituting biogenic materials such as wood products for non-renewable materials appears a compelling means to this end. This underlies the groundswell of interest in replacing steel and concrete with mass timber products like CLT in building structures.

• Increasing forest protection and restoration and improving forest management are the keys: Forests already do a lot of work to reduce emissions and provide valuable ecosystem services. This said wood products harvested from forests in general (and mass timber in particular) will only realize their potential to reduce climate change if:

  • their procurement supports climate-smart forest practices that reduce GHG emissions and store carbon over the status quo while maintaining or restoring resilient ecosystems, or;

  • In forest management, an overall balance is struck between timber production, restoration, and conservation

  • design and construction include intentional reuse of reclaimed or salvaged wood products.

Process and Outcomes

The Summit was preceded by the formation of four Working Groups:

• The Procurement Working Group focused on issues related to sourcing climate-smart wood, including challenges in identifying and locating such products, supply chain complexity, cost premiums, etc.

• The Measuring Progress Working Group concentrated on the current limitations and future potential of methods for quantifying and reporting the true carbon footprint of wood products

• The Forest Management & Incentives Working Group focused on approaches to defining and promoting climate-smart forestry 

• The Collective Action Working Group explored barriers and opportunities to form a “big tent” coalition of diverse stakeholders to advance  climate-smart forest policy

All told, more than half of Summit participants served on a Working Group. Over the course of 10 weeks, each produced a set of key challenges and solutions for their thematic area that were the major focus of work during the Summit itself, with presentations by group leaders followed by breakout sessions where all participants had the opportunity to provide input. Subsequently, these were refined into a set of key takeaways & priority solutions.

Many of the Summit’s conveners and key supporters are committed to carrying this work forward and will do so under the umbrella of the Climate Smart Wood Group. The Climate Smart Wood Group is a “coalition of the ambitious” that will build on the Summit’s success by:

• Developing a clear, actionable, and science-based working definition of climate-smart forestry, with the recognition that an authoritative definition is a future goal (Forest Management & Incentives Working Group priority solution)

• Producing guidance for the procurement of climate-smart wood products that aligns with this working definition (Procurement Working Group priority solution)

• Providing a forum for a facilitated process aimed at clarifying key areas of agreement and disagreement among a broad range of stakeholders, with an eye to developing a consensus vision statement if possible (Collective Action Working Group priority solution)

• Developing educational content and guidance on current strengths and weaknesses of LCA modeling and disclosure of wood products, as well as an agenda for further research on landscape-level and product-level carbon accounting  (Measuring Progress Working Group priority solutions)

A complete set of Summit-related outputs, including Working Group presentations and documents, recordings, break-out group outputs, a list of participant organizations, and an opt-in list of contact information, can be found here.

Knowledge Hub

The following resources were assembled in service of cross-disciplinary conversations and problem-solving that lies at the heart of the Leadership Summit for Climate, Wood, and Forests. We hope that Summit participants can make use of these resources to become more familiar with topics that are beyond their expertise in advance of the Summit, and that they might be of some use in the work that lies ahead.

Level-Setting presentations

This curated shortlist of level-setting presentations are required viewing before the Summit begins.

Reading List

This annotated bibliography of key resources was compiled by Washington Environmental Council (WEC) and covers a range of topics including forest management, conservation & restoration, carbon markets, LCA & embodied carbon, Mass timber, policy, and procurement.

Videos

This collection of short presentations was compiled by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and establishes some key concepts and terminology for the Summit.