Farms and Forestry

PRESENTS

 A National Engineers Week Special

The Wooden Key

By Warren Joseph

Long-term changes in regional temperatures and global weather patterns have been documented for over five decades. Scientists refer to this shift as Climate Change and estimate that it will cause the deaths of millions of people, trillions of dollars in economic losses, and increased catastrophic severe weather by the year 2050 if it isn’t stopped.

Burning fossil fuels is the greatest contributor to the changing climate, with carbon dioxide emissions being the largest aggravating factor. CO2 acts as an insulator, trapping heat in the atmosphere. Experts agree that removing carbon dioxide from the air helps combat climate change with the added benefit of lowering the threat of ocean acidification.

While marshes, mangroves, and seagrass meadows are the largest carbon sinks in the oceans, forests are the biggest on land. Trees remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year and convert it to wood in roots, trunks, and branches.

Mature forests could store up to 1,000 tons of carbon per acre. A growing school of thought is to expand the use of wood to increase the carbon-capturing benefit of forests. For example, we could harvest old growth by taking trees as they reach the end of their natural lifespans and use their wood to build permanent structures. Then, by promoting new growth in place of harvested trees, the forest is no worse off.

With wood construction, your home, factory, or office become a carbon sink, providing long term storage for the carbon dioxide absorbed by trees. Building with wood isn’t a new practice; people have been constructing wooden shelters since before written history. We’ve dwelled in log cabins for over five thousand years and cruder wooden structures for far longer. In 2023 archaeologists discovered the remains of a structure in Kalambo Falls, Zambia, that changed the timeline in human development. Carved wood logs were uncovered that were nearly half a million years old, proving that man began shaping wood with stone tools far earlier than previously believed.

Remnants of wooden tent structures over 13,000 years old were found at the Monte Verde archaeological site in Chile. The Hōryū-ji Temple’s main hall in Nara, Japan, is the oldest standing wooden building in the world, with many timbers dating back over 1,300 years. Norway’s Urnes Stave Church has stood for nearly 700 years.

Today architects and engineers are designing wood structures that are larger and more complex than ever. Finland has the largest wooden structure by surface area (the 2016 Pudasjärvi Log Campus), Japan has the largest in terms of the amount of wood used (the 2025 Grand Ring in Osaka), and USA has the tallest timber structure (the 2022 Ascent tower in Milwaukee).

The next generation of wood construction is plyscrapers; timber towers that are mostly built with wood but include other materials such as concrete and steel in their construction. One major challenge for the engineering world is to adapt to our changing environment. We need to alter the way we look at building with wood; instead of coming up with new ways to build with the least amount of wood to save costs, if we were to build using more wood than we would have longer-lasting structures that capture more carbon from the air.

National Engineers Week

2026