Build It With Wood

Initiatives

Build It With Wood

Visit New England Forestry Foundation’s standalone Build It With Wood website at builditwithwood.org for an in-depth look at this exciting program.

Photo by Charlie Reinertsen

Through the Build It With Wood initiative, New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF) helps speed the adoption of innovative, sustainable and long-lived wood products in construction, and also documents, researches and provides information about their climate benefits.

Why Build With Wood?

Just as the climate crisis demands we transition to renewable energy sources, so too do we need to transition to renewable materials. Wood was one of the earliest renewable materials adopted by human civilization, and remains important today.

New wood construction techniques, paired with new approaches to sustainable forest management, now enable a powerful opportunity to prevent damaging climate change, create a sustainable society, build rural economic opportunity in New England, and improve housing quality and equity.

Visit builditwithwood.org to learn more.

Publications

CLT in New England: Assessing The Wood Supply and Investment Potential for a New England Engineered Wood Products Mill
With support from the USDA Forest Service, NEFF commissioned an analysis of the potential for a New England cross-laminated timber (CLT) mill. The analysis looked at the suitability of New England tree species, their availability, the potential cost of New England-produced CLT, likely returns on investment from a CLT mill, and potential markets for CLT in New England.

New England Forests: The Path to Sustainability
This September 2014 report reveals forests’ existing contributions and future potential to support New Englanders’ lives and lifestyle. It puts forward the first steps we collectively need to take to seize that potential to ensure a sustainable future. Two chapters of The Path to Sustainability focus specifically on wood and one on climate change. Technical reports correspond with each chapter and include data supporting each forest benefit. Chapter 4: Protect Us From Climate Change | Chapter 7: Grow More Wood | Chapter 10: Provide More Wood for Buildings

Build It With Wood Blog Posts and News Stories

An In-depth Look at NEFF’s $30 Million USDA Award

Break out your party hats! This USDA Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program marks a historic moment for NEFF and partners’ efforts to spread climate-smart forestry across New England. Learn about the program and hear the behind-the-scenes story of how NEFF received the award. Writing by NEFF Deputy Director and Climate Fellow Andrea Colnes and NEFF […]

Meet the White Ash

Writing by NEFF Director of Forest Stewardship Chris Pryor White Ash is considered a pioneer to intermediate-successional species that thrives following natural and man-made disturbance to an ecosystem. It is a common species throughout New England, and is found in the Spruce-Fir and Northern Hardwood forest types covered by NEFF’s Exemplary Forestry standards for the […]

$30 Million USDA Climate-Smart Commodities Award to Increase Carbon Storage in New England’s Forests

Media Contact: Andrea Colnes, NEFF Deputy Director & Climate Fellow, acolnes@newenglandforestry.org September 14, 2022 – Marking a transformative investment in our region’s forests, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program has awarded $30 million to the New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF) and its partners to help forest landowners implement climate-smart forest […]

Gaining Climate Momentum

Writing by NEFF Executive Director Bob Perschel and NEFF Communications Manager Tinsley Hunsdorfer After years of developing, practicing and promoting forest-based solutions to climate change, New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF) is now perfectly positioned to take advantage of exciting, once in-a-lifetime opportunities like this year’s $1 billion USDA Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Grant Program, which […]

NEFF and Partners Apply for Game-Changing USDA Grant

Cutting carbon from our electricity and transportation sectors gets lots of attention, but protecting and growing natural carbon storage must play just as big a role in America’s climate plans. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has prioritized this approach, and its Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program has created a $1 billion grant process to help […]

Mass Timber Goes Primetime

Writing by NEFF Forest Policy Fellow Connor Rockett Top photo: A contemporary cross-laminated timber house under construction With a nightly audience of more than a million viewers, the PBS Newshour brought mass timber construction into the spotlight in a recent segment about the Ascent Tower in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The 25-story apartment building will be the […]

Forest-to-Cities Roundup | Spring and Summer 2021

Writing by NEFF Forest Policy Fellow Connor Rockett and NEFF Climate-Forest Specialist Jen Shakun Top photo: Architecture graduate students from Wentworth Institute of Technology toured NEFF’s Prouty Woods property in Littleton, MA this summer and learned about sustainability in the mass timber supply chain. New England Forestry Foundation’s Forest-to-Cities Climate Challenge (FTC) is helping to […]

Climate Solutions: Putting New England’s Woods to Work

Learn how we’re beginning to put Exemplary Forestry to work across the region, while also championing the sustainable wood these standards produce as a replacement for other, more energy-intensive building materials. In summer 2021, New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF) ran a climate solutions special issue of its newsletter, Into the Woods. The issue’s introduction and […]

Climate Solutions: A New Climate Wedge

How much carbon dioxide can New England forests remove from or keep out of the atmosphere? In summer 2021, New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF) ran a climate solutions special issue of its newsletter, Into the Woods. The issue’s introduction and four articles are closely tied together, and so have been posted online as a single […]

The Latest From NEFF’s Initiatives

New England Forestry Foundation’s initiatives continue to drive forward innovation in conservation and sustainable forestry. Keep reading for an in-depth look at NEFF’s overall programmatic goals, and for individual progress reports from fiscal year 2020-2021. This year marked the launch of the Exemplary Forestry Center (the “Center”) at NEFF—the vehicle we will use to take […]

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