How NEFF’s Climate-Smart Wood Sourcing Program Works

To Build a Better World, Start With Climate-Smart Wood and Its Sourcing

Some producers and consumers of wood products are looking to make a difference by growing and sourcing climate-smart wood, as concerns grow about climate-disturbance impacts on ecosystems and community health, and as interest grows in reaching carbon-emission reduction targets.

Climate-smart wood is any wood-based product that has been sourced from forests that are primarily managed to be resilient and adaptive to climate change and serve as a long-term carbon sink on the landscape. However, despite wood being a frequently used and purchased product, there is no standard definition or verification process for climate-smart wood used across the industry. This leaves consumers with no easy way of evaluating whether the wood they purchase is managed for these climate-smart values.

The New England Forestry Foundation’s (NEFF) five-year, Climate-Smart Commodities (CSC) pilot project is ideally positioned to address these issues. This blog post touches base with Vanessa Komada, a member of the NEFF’s Bioeconomy Initiative, and their work to develop climate-smart wood demand in New England.

Vanessa Komada

I’m pleased to introduce myself for the first time on the NEFF blog. So hello, my name is Vanessa Komada, and for the past year, I have been NEFF’s Wood Sourcing Specialist.

To better understand what I do here at NEFF, let’s start with a few questions that get at the complexities of wood product sourcing:

1. Do you use wooden furniture, paneling, floors, or other wood materials in the place you live? Have you or any member of your family ever played a wooden instrument, swung a baseball bat in the backyard, or used a wooden spoon? I am assuming 95 percent of people would say yes.
2. Do you know where these wood-based products were grown and manufactured? Do you know what values were prioritized in forest management by the original landowner? This process is what we mean by intentional wood sourcing, and I assume now only around 5 percent of people would say yes.

These are the questions I seek to answer and make transparent in my work. But where do we start? Creating a system that can allow landowners to verify and celebrate climate-forward management is a key first step in meeting the needs of wood consumers and forest management certifiers. As you may know, NEFF is a national leader in advocating for and practicing forestry that increases carbon storage in the forest as well as forest adaptation to disturbance and climate change. While wood is a global commodity, we are working to develop a regional New England-based climate-smart criteria to pilot on lands managed by NEFF and its partners.

Secondly, we are working to better understand and improve networks between landowners, loggers, sawmills, manufacturers, and end-users. As mentioned earlier, there is limited capacity in the forest industry currently to track and trace specific wood products through the supply chain. While some third-party forest certification systems, like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), are the best tools for providing those assurances within a global supply chain, they currently provide limited or incomplete information about the climate impact or benefit in the forest. Thus, we are working to pilot a few projects that utilize tracking technology for climate-smart verified wood. The ultimate goal is to make climate-smart wood more common and accessible in the marketplace.

Lastly, a key component to growing demand is reaching out to consumers. Under the CSC grant, our markets team has a significant focus on mass timber* construction for affordable housing as a fast and sustainable way to deliver much-needed housing in the region. Thus, through outreach and networking at conferences and through partners, our team connects with architects, engineers, construction firms, and developers in the building sector throughout the U.S. to build recognition and demand for these products.

It is time for the forest industry and wood consumers to visualize the term “climate-smart” as extending beyond the landscape to include the role of wood products in building a more sustainable bioeconomy. I hope you all will continue to support us through this journey and anticipate what is to come.

*Mass timber is a type of wood product created by gluing, doweling, or nailing smaller wood layers together to create a stronger product that can replace steel and concrete and be used in structural applications such as beams and columns.

Charlie Reinertsen