Realising the Nordic vision of a carbon-neutral and circular built environment will be all but impossible without addressing the emissions from construction materials and processes that make up 11% of global emissionsWorld Green Building Council. Sustainably sourced wood, as the only major renewable building material and a resource that the Nordic region has in abundance, has the potential to make a significant contribution to reducing carbon emissions from construction, supporting the shift towards a circular and bio-based economy while being mindful of biodiversity.
Multi-storey wooden buildings are now discussed as an exciting solution to the dual challenges of housing shortages and low-carbon construction at every level of government in the Nordics, but there remains a great deal to be done to achieve the scale needed.
Across the Nordic region the utilisation of wood in construction varies significantly, and many decades of efforts on harmonisation of building codes have largely yielded few tangible results. As such, there is a great deal still to be learnt from Nordic neighbours.
These are the questions that this policy brief sets out to answer.
Whilst the Nordic region has many shared characteristics, it is important to understand the different needs and abilities of each country before coming to conclusions at a regional level. This policy snapshot gives a run-down of each Nordic country, taking the temperature of the policies, initiatives and underlying characteristics of each nation, tying together into the common challenges and opportunities that the Nordics face together to accelerate the use of wood in construction. We present not the typical recommendations for policymakers, but instead six unanswered questions that must be addressed going forward.
Nordic Declaration on Low Carbon Construction and Circular Principles in the Construction Sector – Nordic Ministers responsible for Construction and Housing – October 2019
Please note that while the authors have attempted to gather the most up to date picture of the policy landscape across each Nordic country for this publication, it represents only a snapshot in time in 2020. For the most recent policy developments, especially around building regulations, we would recommend checking with each relevant national body.
While the Nordics have much in common, there are important differences between Nordic nations and regions by nature of geography and demography. Here we present an overview of some important facts about wood and construction in the Nordic countries.
 World Bank, 2016 Eurostat, 2015 Eurostat, 2018 (DK 2016, Iceland 2017) Own calculation based on Eurostat 2018 and World Bank 2018 Own calculation based on Eurostat 2017 United Nations Statistics Division; Statistics Sweden, 2017
A timeline of climate targets and selected forthcoming lifecycle policies in the Nordics.
Reducing emissions while building healthy, green and liveable Nordic towns and cities is possible through increased use of wood in construction. The Nordics have some excellent examples of this and policies in place to deliver towards those goals, but meaningful scale is still to be reached.
To achieve the shared Nordic vision of a low-carbon and circular construction sector that uses more wood, we believe that the following six questions must be addressed by the industry and policymakers.
The Nordics can deliver large amounts of sustainably sourced forest-based construction materials; a prerequisite for a genuinely sustainable wood construction industry. Additionally, the region stands at the forefront of digitalisation.
The challenge: Nordic production capacity to turn those raw materials into building elements such as CLT and glulam cannot keep up with demand, forcing projects to source from elsewhere with associated increase in costs and emissions. Digitalisation must be integrated through the entire supply chain to reap the benefits that it can offer in traceability and LCA.
As LCA-based regulations and climate declarations are forthcoming across the Nordics, greater knowledge on the climate impact of construction and materials is being developed in the industry. Additionally, strong pan-Nordic collaboration on harmonising methods is well underway.
The challenge: without a long-term vision to legally-binding emission limits, as well as agreement on the tools, data and methods for calculating lifecycle emissions, progress here will falter and industry’s potential to get ahead and utilise that to their advantage will be capped.
The Nordics have world-leading knowledge and skills, with formidable competences in sustainable forestry, design, architecture, engineering that are being applied to advancing wood in construction. This is a powerful export and makes the region well-placed have wider influence at European and global levels.
The challenge: these competences are not evenly distributed in the Nordics, greater integration, coordination and knowledge-sharing is needed, especially among the many intermediaries in the sector.
Performance-based and material neutral principles have become a cornerstone of Nordic building regulations, meaning that at least in theory wood can compete with other materials on a level playing field.
The challenge: there is still a tendency towards conventional and polluting materials and ways of working. The handling of regulations sometimes lacks the flexibility to deal with the nuances of wood for example, making the process more cumbersome for new low-carbon materials to gain approval.
Nordic Municipalities have proven to be crucial actors in accelerating low-carbon wood construction locally. There are many good examples how local strategies in procurement, collaboration and clustering can be powerful tools.
The challenge: municipalities could move even further and faster with greater freedom and creativity in the tendering process, and despite some leading hotspots, ambitious local action is not widespread, with great regional disparities.
As frontrunners in tackling the climate emergency, with abundant knowledge and resources, the Nordics are already well underway in transitioning to a low-carbon, circular, and increasingly bio-based built environment.
The challenge: there still lacks agreed methods on calculating the carbon sequestration and storage that wood in construction represents and linking that to financial mechanisms that fund carbon removals, which would change the economic case for building in wood substantially.
While there is consensus across the Nordics that wood can play a central role in reducing emissions from construction, each country has taken a different approach to achieving that goal.
In this section we deep dive into the policy approaches taken in each Nordic country, noting strengths and weaknesses, and allowing Nordic neighbours to compare notes and learn from each other going forward.
Forests have more political, cultural and economic importance in Finland than much of the rest of the Nordics, accounting for 2% of GDP but over a fifth of export earnings. Finland’s forestry sets the gold standard in producing sustainable forest products, with high levels of digitalisation, through use of big data and digital tools. While Finland has been quietly getting about the work of building in wood for many years, uptake of wood in multi-storey buildings remains slow. Experience suggests however that attitudes are changing towards wood and the cost argument is being debunked time and time again.
At a national level, there has been a demonstrated long term commitment to improving the market penetration of wood over the past 20 years, through the funding of multiple initiatives and ambitious target setting. For example, the government recently set a goal that 45% of all public construction in 2025 should be from wood, up from only 15% in 2019. At the heart of national policy efforts is a dedicated Wood Construction Programme within the Ministry of the Environment, which provides a central guiding force to advance the wood agenda both within and outside government. The results of those efforts are starting to pay dividends in the past few years, with a marked uptick in wood’s share in construction.
Below is a breakdown of some of the key policy areas in Finland, that are enabling or hindering wood in construction:
|Like the rest of the Nordics, performance-based and material neutral building regulations have been mainstreamed in Finland for some time. Updates to the building codes in 1997 and again in 2011 have permitted wood construction up to four then eight floors without having to meet additional fire requirements.|
|One point of difference on fire regulation in Finland is the ruling principle of protecting people and evacuation times. This is different to Sweden’s approach for instance, which makes harmonising such regulations cross-border tricky.|
|Finland has been slightly ahead of the curve having published a roadmap for low-carbon construction back in 2017, which included a goal to incorporate LCA into the building codes by mid-2020s.|
|Public spending on construction of new buildings in Finland is around €1.5billion annually, and policy has been developed in the form of voluntary green public procurement (GPP) criteria for low-carbon public buildings to harness the power of public procurement to accelerate the use of wood. These will be updated in the future to keep GPP at the forefront of ambition.|
|Competences||Research and Development|
|As well as the many strong education institutions in Finland that are working with wood in construction through vocational and academic programs, competence building is also taking place within the industry and at a municipal level. For example, the government has funded a successful training programme for structural engineers to bring them up to speed with new materials and methods in construction. This has proved a useful way to shift out of conventional ways of working.||Finland’s many strong research centres and applied science universities that have a focus on developing skills and knowledge for the next generation of wood construction are also leading on R&D in the field, particularly around circular construction.|
|An additional focus of the National Wood Construction Program has been to increase know-how at a local level and support municipalities in their decision making processes.||Another success of the national Wood Construction Program has been to launch R&D projects in collaboration between industry, academia and the authorities.|
|Marketing and Advocacy|
|Another role of the Environment Ministry’s Wood Construction Program is the promotion of wood both within government and more widely. This ensures that there is a voice speaking for wood construction at the governmental table so to speak. In addition, there are trade associations and other bodies that do good work to promote wood in construction nationally, although international presence and representation could be improved to strengthen the export of timber construction expertise from Finland.|
Following on from the government’s low-carbon construction roadmap, compulsory LCA-based emission limits on new buildings should be introduced by 2025 or earlier in a timeline that is currently being developed. This should help to strengthen the case for wood, while work on establishing a common database to work from is ongoing. By 2025, the aim is also that 45% of public construction should be in wood.
A second key area in which Finland is leading the way on policy development is around the building ‘handprint’ concept, which aims to formalise the positive carbon impacts of new construction (through carbon storage or renewable energy generation for instance). It is proposed to integrate this into the LCA methodology, which could be a game-changer in assessing, accounting for and ultimately financing avoided emissions.
Oodi is a homage to traditional Finnish wooden construction, a new library and multifunctional citizens’ forum for 2.5 million visitors a year that pushes the boundaries of large wooden public buildings.
Compared to its Nordic neighbours, Denmark’s forestry and wood-based industries are small, with the volume of timber and roundwood production around 5% of that in Finland, for example. As such, forestry doesn’t account for a huge proportion of the economy of jobs in Denmark. Despite a handful of good examples, mass timber construction in Denmark has until now lagged a little behind other parts of the Nordics, although that is beginning to change.
Tackling carbon emissions in Denmark’s construction sector has been rapidly rising up the political agenda, with wood’s underutilised role in the material mix gaining particular traction since 2019. Discussions in parliament and government are ongoing, through a growing number of hearings and consultations examining the potential policy levers to build more with wood, but substantial wood policy is yet to be decided upon.
Below is a breakdown of some of the key policy areas in Denmark, that are enabling or hindering wood in construction:
|Denmark’s building codes are, at least on paper, performance based and material neutral, but wood still faces some additional barriers in this area.|
|To meet fire safety requirements when building higher than four storeys, individual technical assessments are needed in planning due to a lack of pre-accepted solutions, and wood buildings must withstand longer burn times (120 minutes) than other materials (60 minutes). On site acoustic testing during the construction phase is required in Denmark, as opposed to being able to model acoustics to meet regulation at the design stage. These factors can be seen to have hindered the development of wood construction, as they create greater risk and costs for developers.|
|Municipalities are proving to be critical actors in Denmark for driving an increased uptake of wood in construction, especially through public procurement. However, regulation is somewhat restrictive in allowing local authorities to stipulate LCA demands in the tendering process for example, which could lead to more public buildings in wood.|
|Competences||Research and Development|
|Denmark has strong competences in architecture, design, and urban planning, which have not been fully leveraged to accelerate wood in construction.||There are a handful of university departments - mostly engineering -working on LCA, but Denmark is not home to any notable wood-focused research centres driving home-grown R&D.|
|Limited policy has been introduced to develop competences for wood construction, and while interest is growing at a student level, teaching competences within Danish institutions could be stronger to meet this demand and equip the next generation with skills and knowledge for wood. Additionally, industry must take greater responsibilities for building competences in house.|
|Marketing and Advocacy|
|Given the small size of Denmark’s forestry sector, it is home to numerous organisations and networks aiming to accelerate the development of wood in construction nationally through marketing and advocacy. Several notable Danish stakeholders are also involved in wood in construction network projects at a European level.|
The dominant forthcoming policy in this area in Denmark is the introduction of ‘sustainability class’ for construction, beginning a test phase in 2020. The ‘sustainability class’ is a holistic attempt to improve not only the climate impact of buildings through LCAs, but also other issues including resource use, indoor climate, natural light etc. The initiative is initially voluntary, but may become mandatory by 2023, with no indication given to date of LCA-based emission limits being imposed. This policy has buy-in from industry and gives a clear pathway in the short term, but greater certainty is needed on the long term goals, and how the industry will develop sufficient competences.
Additional discussion is currently underway to raise the current floor limits for timber construction in regard to fire regulation, which would surely remove one barrier to building more with wood.
Lisbjerg Bakke is a vision of what sustainable social housing in Denmark can look like. The hybrid timber construction of 40 apartments is an open source design that anyone can access, and has 70% lower climate emissions and 28% lower lifecycle costs compared to the Danish standard.
Norway’s forests, while covering less land area and being less productive than Sweden and Finland’s, remain an important resource to the development of a growing bioeconomy. Wood’s potential to reduce construction emissions hasn’t gone unnoticed in Norway, which has some excellent lighthouse projects including the world’s current highest timber-framed building, Mjøstårnet, and wood is now the leading construction material in schools and kindergardens. Imports of building materials – including wood – are increasing, highlighting the importance of further developing local wood supply chains to meet growing demand.
Wood in construction doesn’t receive the same central focus in the Norwegian Government’s policy as in Finland for example, instead being included in the fringes of government strategies on bioeconomy, forestry and climate mitigation. However, Norway’s world-leading goal of carbon neutrality by 2030 and the fact that 10% of national emission stem from construction materials has brought renewed attention to wood solutions in construction. Local and regional actors in Norway have been particularly crucial in the development of wood construction, and have a great deal of autonomy to push down construction emissions through the use of wood.
Below is a breakdown of some of the key policy areas in Norway, that are enabling or hindering wood in construction:
|Norway no longer strictly limits the number of floors that can be built in wood, having moved more towards performance based regulation regarding materials. Despite this, fire regulations are still proving problematic for some wood construction projects to meet the requirements.|
|While national regulation has not been hugely helpful in advancing wood in construction, the flexibility of local and regional planning authorities to go further has yielded some impressive results. This has primarily been achieved through masterplans, and the ability for planning authorities to introduce requirements that mandate use of renewable building materials for example.|
|Norway has recently introduced the NS 3720 standard to bring a common way of working with climate assessment of buildings, but any moves towards climate declarations or limits are still under discussion.|
|Competences||Research and Development|
|Norway has several established and successful centres for research and teaching around wood construction that are leading on building competency. Experiences suggest that student uptake on wood-related courses is increasing, demonstrating a positive growth in interest amongst the industry’s next generation.||R&D and stimulating innovation have been at the cornerstone of Norway’s policy efforts to increase wood in construction, primarily through the bioeconomy and forestry strategies.|
|The government, under the auspices of Innovation Norway and the National Research Council has run numerous projects aimed at increasing value through the entire forestry chain, notably including the ‘Wood-based Innovation Program’, an initiative to increase competitiveness of timber-framed multi-storey buildings and value-added processing in for that sector.|
|Marketing and Advocacy|
|Norwegian wood trade associations have long established relations within the construction sector, and have been effective at promoting wood solutions in construction as well as guiding municipalities through the process of building with wood. These organisations have however not focused many efforts on advocating for policy changes at a national level.|
|Other initiatives and partnerships, such as the ‘wood ambassadors network’ which is partly funded by the regions and municipalities has helped to forge new connections across the value chain and brought wood into consideration on many construction projects.|
Regulation of construction emissions and climate declarations is still under consideration at the time of writing. While it is clear that new technical declarations are forthcoming, it is currently unclear exactly how carbon emissions will be integrated into this. There is promise however, given the established standards for calculation and interest in creating joint Nordic LCA databases. It is expected that over time climate declaration requirements and eventually scaling emission limits will be introduced. The question remains on the ambition of the timeline that the government will set in that regard.
Lade School in Trondheim is demonstrating how municipalities can use the power of public procurement in driving change towards wood throughout the construction supply chain, reducing costs and meeting climate goals along the way.
Sweden has the most forest area and highest wood production of any Nordic country, which has a large importance for the jobs and economy with over 25,000 people employed in forestry and forest-related industries in 2018. There has been a strong drive for wood in construction over many years in Sweden, which today is seeing significant uptake in multi-storey buildings. This is especially true in residential construction, which makes up a greater proportion (around two thirds) of the market than in the rest of the Nordics, although wood is still considered an underutilised resource.
Sweden is often held up as an example internationally for the steps it has taken to realise the potential of wood in the construction supply chain, while developing local bioeconomies and cutting carbon emissions. This has been enabled by a pro-wood policy landscape over many years, but wood could still play a greater role in the material mix, and is an issue that is attracting renewed interest at a ministerial level, and new policy developments.
Below is a breakdown of some of the key policy areas in Sweden, that are enabling or hindering wood in construction:
|Sweden’s building codes are both material neutral and performance based, and experience suggests that wood constructions do not face any significant additional hindrances from a regulatory perspective.|
|One key enabling factor in Sweden’s wood construction progress has been the lifting of any height limits on wood buildings over 15 years ago, which sent a clear signal to developers and designers to go all in for large multi-storey wood buildings. Other factors such as the ability to use digital models at the design phase to meet acoustic requirements rather than laborious on-site testing have been further enabling policies for forest-based materials to gain traction in the market.|
|Competences||Research and Development|
|The most notable way in which Sweden has developed competences through the supply chain is in the unique collaborations between industry, academia and local government. This is built upon a base of several education institutions with strengths in wood and construction.||R&D in Sweden is driven by substantial public funding for research into the practical application of material science of wood across the value chain. The most effective examples are collected in clusters around related expertise that lead to new and innovative ways of working.|
|Such developments are no accident, but rather the result of targeted public funding to establish and support specialist centres of excellence.|
|Marketing and Advocacy|
|With the importance of the forestry sector to the Swedish economy and jobs – as well as the country’s sheer size – there are many organisations and initiatives working to promote and advocate for wood in construction. Sweden has done more than most other Nordics countries in marketing its wood solutions to a wider international audience, and has reaped the benefit from that in export of knowledge and goods.|
The most significant current policy development is the introduction of a requirement from 2022 for all new buildings to submit a climate declaration on emissions from production and construction phases (A1-5). This must be completed and cleared by the local municipality before construction begins. Initially simply declaring the emissions is all that will be required, and it is proposed that emission limits will have to be met from 2027, with 40% and 80% reductions by 2035 and 2043 respectively. Additionally, more stages of buildings’ lifecycle emissions will be gradually introduced into the declarations.
The result of this clearly laid out timeline is expected to be a greater knowledge in the sector on CO2e emissions per m2, which can put wood on a more even footing with other materials.
Kajstaden is Västerås’ new landmark nine-storey timber tower, which has reduced material emissions by 44%, and created a business model that is spreading all over Sweden.
Iceland is an outlier in the Nordics when it comes to forestry and forest-based industries in that they are almost negligible. While a tiny amount of forestry takes place, it is very much at a pilot stage in terms of producing anything suitable for construction. Iceland imports almost all of its building materials, with the exception of mineral wool, causing difficulties when it comes to accounting for the emissions related to materials produced elsewhere. Despite the fact that timber construction elements, with a high strength-to-weight ratio, offer an effective solution in this regard, uptake of wooden multi-storey buildings in Iceland is very low.
Iceland has done a great deal of work in policy development over the past decades to reduce operational emissions from buildings to almost zero through renewable heat and power. This means that although emissions embedded in materials may be high, overall building emissions are generally low when seen from a LCA perspective. Unlike in other Nordic countries, Iceland has not actively pursued policy to encourage the use of wood in construction.
Today’s building regulations in Iceland are not material specific, but performance based, and have been simplified in recent years. The lack of penetration of wood construction can be attributed to a lack of knowledge, experience and competence in building with wood in Iceland, although several research and pilot projects are beginning to examine its potential.
Lacking a domestic forestry industry doesn’t help here, as there aren’t the additional drivers towards wood in the form of trade associations and other third parties.
Work is underway to develop a roadmap for sustainable construction in 2030, which should include some aspects of LCA. It is as yet unclear whether forthcoming legislation will require climate declarations as in other Nordic countries.
In the government’s latest climate plan, renewed research efforts were announced to push towards a circular and low-carbon construction sector in Iceland, bringing together new partnerships to achieve this goal.
Not far from Iceland’s largest glacier, Vatnajökull, Flatey Farm has used a large timber-framed building to refresh their dairy farming operations, with reduced carbon emissions and increased welfare for animals and employees.
This publication was prepared in late 2020 by the Nordic Wood in Construction Secretariat, through analysis of national policy documents and interviews with experts in each Nordic country. Additional insights were gained from a series of expert roundtable dialogues, and learnings from the secretariat’s activities from 2018-2020.
Acknowledgement must go to all those who have given input to this work, and those who have taken part in interviews and roundtable dialogues; your insights have been invaluable.
The team behind this report, the Nordic Wood in Construction Secretariat, is an initiative commissioned by the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Swedish Government, and hosted by EIT Climate-KIC, with an aim to support and accelerate the use of wood in construction in the Nordics. They do this by improving regional dialogue, knowledge-sharing and collaboration on wood in construction, and sharing Nordic solutions with the world.
Accelerating low-carbon construction with wood
– a Nordic Policy Snapshot
ISBN 978-92-893-6901-5 (PDF)
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© Nordic Council of Ministers 2021
Layout: Gitte Wejnold
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