EU backs timber

Successful lobbying by UK timber trade bodies has helped persuade the EU Environment Council to back sustainably-produced wood products as a “climate-friendly material” at the upcoming UN climate change convention in Copenhagen.

The Timber Trade Federation (TTF) and ConFor worked with the European timber industry body to get the Council to move away from the “carbon accounting” position on wood adopted since the UN’s Kyoto convention in 1997.

This ruled that when a tree is harvested, any carbon locked up in the timber is released back into the atmosphere, regardless of whether it was made into a product that lasted for decades.

The Council’s position is now that “harvested wood products” act as a carbon store for their lifetime and it says it will include them “in the accounting modalities of a Copenhagen [climate change] agreeement”.

ConFor’s Rupert Pigot said that thanks to the combined lobbying “the message will be given to Copenhagen that this is an industry that can help deliver a low –carbon economy”.