Enables a deeper connection between our buildings and the people and forests that produce the wood products.
Helps meet clients’ Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals and illuminates the full range of possibilities available to meet individual project goals. Builds understanding and potential to elevate the CSF, community, conservation and equity opportunities that align with client values.
Creates conditions for project teams (building owners, architects, designers, contractors) to develop deep supply chain relationships. These relationships can help manage cost and supply chain risk related to material availability and build networks contractors can leverage to secure future project bids.
Creates demand and elevates expectations for wood product suppliers to document and differentiate source forestry that provides enhanced climate benefits versus business-as-usual. This can also drive investment in infrastructure and systems that reduce associated burdens.
Can better capture and connect sourcing to environmental impacts and outcomes important for procurement evaluations (e.g. GHG emissions or removals associated with timber harvest and transportation, biodiversity benefits, fire-risk reduction, etc.).
Challenges
Requires additional time and planning up front.
Some pathways require much more effort than others, depending on context (e.g., procurement geography or product-specific considerations).
Requirements that add labor or other costs need to add value to the material, or otherwise be compensated for, before industry will adopt them.
Secrecy, resistance, and inertia throughout the supply chain – for competitive reasons, it is typical for supply chain actors to closely guard information about their sources.
Requires a local understanding of the supply chain. Learning whom to ask, what to ask for, and where to go for sourcing information in a given region can be a time-consuming task, particularly in early project stages when suppliers have not yet been selected.
