Industry Services
Industry Services
Tom Henderson
Woodknowledge Wales Ltd
Tom Henderson believes a strategic circular timber economy can unlock climate, housing and economic benefits for Wales—but only if we align forest policy, processing, and procurement.
As global efforts to decarbonise accelerate, timber is back in the spotlight—not just as a renewable material, but as a strategic climate solution. And yet, in Wales, despite world-class growing conditions and deep cultural connections to land, our timber resource remains underutilised.
We import most of the wood we use. Our forests are not expanding fast enough to meet national afforestation targets. And of the timber we do harvest, the vast majority is directed to short-lived uses—pallets, fencing, biomass— while only 6% is structurally graded for housing.
Meanwhile, demand for timber in construction is booming. If Wales is serious about climate leadership, rural regeneration, and affordable housing, we must ask: what would it take to turn our timber value chain into an engine of low-carbon prosperity?
Timber and Decarbonising Wales1 , an evidence-based report written as part of the Timber Industrial Strategy for Wales is an attempt to answer that question. It sets out a joined-up vision: expanding forest cover, managing it well, using timber wisely, and recovering its value through reuse, remanufacturing and recycling.
Timber is uniquely suited to circularity. Though it degrades over time, each piece can serve multiple lives. A beam can become joinery; offcuts become panel board; fibres can be recycled into insulation; and only at the very end should timber become fuel. When wood is kept in circulation – in buildings, products and fibres – it stores carbon, displaces more harmful materials, and generates greater economic value from every tree harvested.
A key piece of the puzzle is engineered timber. Products like cross- laminated timber and glulam offer high-performance, low-carbon alternatives to steel and concrete. Yet the UK currently has no large-scale engineered timber production—and imports dominate.
Wales has the softwood resource (notably Sitka spruce), the workforce potential, and the market need to change that. A modest-scale CLT facility using 60,000 m3 of Welsh timber could produce 30,000 m3 of panels a year – storing over 22,000 tonnes of CO2 annually, creating skilled rural jobs, and keeping value in the domestic economy.
The same logic applies to wood fibre insulation—ideal for retrofitting homes, yet less than 0.1% of the UK insulation market. As new fibre recovery techniologies and systems come on line, Wales could lead the way in recycling and manufacturing bio- based materials for net-zero construction.
But manufacturing is only one part of the story. It begins—and depends—on what we grow. Forest creation and management are crucial to the long-term carbon story.
Afforestation alone, if scaled to 5,000 hectares per year, could deliver around 15 million tonnes of CO2e removals by 2050. Add to that the carbon stored in timber products, and the avoided emissions from substitution, and forestry becomes a major contributor to national climate targets.
Forest management matters too. Adaptive forest management—silviculture suited to site and climate— can enhance both forest resilience and the provision of ecosystem services. As climate pressures mount across all European temperate forests, shifts in what we grow will be unavoidable—and there is an opportunity to align this with demand. We therefore need to bring markets and processing into step with adaptive management, while also considering the long-term markets for the alternative species we establish. At the same time, Wales has a comparative advantage in being able to grow trees exceptionally quickly. In the context of European forestry, where traditional systems are increasingly threatened by climate pressures and institutional inertia, Wales’ more fluid land use and timber sector creates scope for dynamism. Without this, we risk degradation—or worse, offshoring our climate impacts by relying on slow- growing boreal forests elsewhere, as Elidh Forster warns.
Housing is where many of these threads come together. Timber- frame construction offers one of the clearest climate wins—each home locking in 15–18 tonnes of CO2 from the wood alone, and avoiding another 15–20 tonnes by replacing concrete and steel.
Redirecting just 15% of Wales’s current timber harvest into housing could support over 8,000 homes per year and save around 0.56 MtCO2e annually. That’s equivalent to the emissions from over 120,000 cars.
Most Welsh softwood—primarily Sitka spruce—can meet C16 construction standards, but specifier confidence remains low. This is where public procurement and programmes like Tai ar y Cyd come in—creating stable demand for Welsh-grown timber and supporting a homegrown industrial base.
Timber alone is not a silver bullet. But used wisely, it can help us meet our goals for climate action, housing supply, rural jobs, and resource resilience.
To get there, we need to act on several fronts:
This is not a prescriptive roadmap, but a shared evidence base to guide future investment, policy and practice. It offers a practical foundation for decision-makers across forestry, housing, manufacturing and public procurement to coordinate action— helping Wales transition from extractive to regenerative systems, and from imported dependency to homegrown opportunity.
www.woodknowledge.wales/timber-and-decarbonising-wales/
