Mass Timber Environmental Impact

The following summary is taken from the keynote presentation at BuildingEnergy Boston 2019, “Carbon Drawdown Now! Turning Buildings into Carbon Sinks”. 

• Making carbon-storing buildings is the most impactful action the building community can undertake to address climate change.
• Embodied Energy – scaling the overall impact from cradle to gate.
• Truly addressing climate change requires us to change our thinking and move beyond a narrow, mechanistic view of issues to an interconnected style of thinking. Lots of humans single-mindedly pursue a fossil-fuel economy to the exclusion of all other impacts including human health, mass extinction, loss of biodiversity, climate change, racism, classism, sexism.
• We must drastically reduce our building carbon emissions within a decade. Material substitutions in a business-as-usual scenario aren’t sufficient. We need to think outside our silos as building and design professionals and connect our work to that of other trades such as sustainable forestry, eco-agriculture, and movements for social and climate change.