The worldwide lumber shortage continues

Wood is the only building material that helps to combat climate change. It is critical to remove carbon from the atmosphere while also reducing any new carbon emissions and wood providing Trees achieve both of these goals.

Trees naturally absorb CO2, thereby promoting clean and healthy air for all of us and by conserving soil, assisting the water cycle, trees additionally benefit the this planet. Since humans first practised agriculture 12,000 years ago, we have lost nearly half of the estimated original 5.8 to 6 trillion trees, leaving only about 3 trillion on Earth.

Up to 16 billion trees are felled annually to make way for our human advancement. As you would appreciate a number of animals find shelter in trees, which also support the natural food webs (a natural interconnection of food chains) to sustain the life of these animals.

Trees are unfortunately frequently viewed as disposable, and they are over-harvested for less than worthwhile reasons we come up with.

So, while we’re using trees to build our houses and having fun in the shed, we should keep in mind that unless we become a little more mature and intelligent about how we manage trees on this planet, they may not be around for as long as we’d like.

If you’d like to learn more about Trees and the important role they have on this planet, here’s an article I wrote about it on one of my other sites.

There was a massive increase in home purchases and renovations during the epidemic, driving up timber prices but also creating a global shortage. A post-covid surge in the building boom, as well as bushfires and floods, have all significantly reduced the amount of lumber available for home construction around the world. Affected countries are understandably conducting their own investigations in order to find solutions to the problems and ensure that construction companies can continue to complete critical housing projects, but I don’t believe there is a short-term solution available.

It will most likely take several years to fully recover from how the Covid-19 pandemic caused an unplanned housing boom as homeowners all over the world struggled to adapt their spaces to sudden changes in lifestyles, such as working from home.

Construction professionals were in high demand, which was fuelled in part by government stimulus packages in some countries. Whatever the reason, there was a massive increase in demand for building materials all over the world. Concurrently, a number of challenges have hampered the global supply of lumber / building timber.

A bark-eating mountain pine beetle and successive seasons of catastrophic bushfires have decimated Canada’s softwood supply, which typically supplies roughly one-third of American lumber. The operational constraints imposed by the pandemic reduced the amount of lumber that sawmills could process for about two years. While Europe had a surplus of felled logs ready for sawing into lumber at the start of the pandemic, output in European mills has been delayed for at least two years due to Covid19-related working constraints, exacerbating the problem of timber scarcity.

Sawmill operations were restricted for similar reasons all over the world, and there was an unprecedented shortage of shipping containers during the same period, affecting lumber imports into countries desperate for whatever lumber was available. Unfortunately, construction projects frequently take a long time to complete, making them especially vulnerable to fluctuations in supply and demand. By default, the majority of construction companies work on fixed-price contracts, which subject the contractor to fluctuating expenses and affect their overall profit or loss.

Given the ongoing volatility of timber prices, many businesses are naturally rethinking their business structures and processes in order to reduce shrinking profit margins. It’s eye-opening to see how different countries rely on various sources of lumber from around the world, as well as how the shortage has impacted the construction sector and home repairs/renovations. There must be thousands of homeowners who are still having problems as a result of the building materials supply shortage; I’ve heard that in some cases, the lumber shortage has extended the time it takes to build a new house by nearly a year.

Although we all know that wood is a renewable resource, this does not mean that its use in construction will last forever. There’s a good chance we’ll run out of forests if they’re deforested faster than we can plant them, and one unavoidable fact is that our planet’s population has risen to roughly 7.7 billion people and is growing at a rate of 1.1 percent per year. According to what I’ve read, the population will reach 10 billion by 2046. Is it ever possible to plant enough trees to offset the ever-increasing amount of land clearing required to make room for all of these people to build houses?

Whatever the versatility of timber, if forest resources are consumed without proper provision for sustainable timber supply, the global demand when our population reaches 10 billion will undoubtedly be unmanageable. Countries that supply timber to countries that only consume timber will inevitably expire or run a worrying deficit. Why isn’t there a significant increase in tree planting happening when it’s obvious that we need it? It most likely is, but any efforts in this area will be dwarfed by our annual global land clearing rate of approximately 10 million hectares. Let us not forget how much lumber has been destroyed by bushfires all over the world in recent years.

If we are to have a chance, we will need a magical solution to stop the bushfires. In the Australian state of New South Wales alone, bushfires destroyed more than five million hectares of land in national parks in 2019-20. Our planet now has about 3 trillion trees left, which is roughly half of what existed before the first humans began chopping them down. Trees provide environmental benefits such as carbon storage, soil conservation, and water cycle regulation; unfortunately, trees are too frequently treated as disposable; it’s difficult to comprehend how ignorant we all are; we evidently believe it’s acceptable to continue harvesting trees for commercial gain or as an annoyance to human progress.

We have destroyed more than half of the world’s estimated 5.8 to 6 trillion trees since our species began farming 12,000 years ago. I don’t think we’ll ever be smart enough to change how we use this planet and its resources enough to avoid the tree problem we’ll face in a few decades. Imagine if governments around the world tried to slow population growth by limiting the number of children a family could have. I recall thinking how terrible I thought China’s one-child policy was when they restricted most Chinese families to having only one child. It was first used on a large scale by the Chinese government in 1980, and it was phased out in 2016.

If you tried to control or slow population growth in almost any country today, the outcry would be deafening; even on our best days, we humans do not like being told what to do.   So, I guess the FAA in the United States should stop impeding Elon Musk and his rocket-building buddies as soon as possible, because there’s a better chance of us figuring out an effective way to live on another planet than of us all coming together and fixing this planet’s environmental problems. I believe our timber supplies will continue to be in danger of ‘running low’ to ‘running out’ as a result of irresponsibility in the timber supply chain, which begins with forest management. Poorly maintained forests, as well as massive commercial harvesting and land clearing destruction, will continue.

Perhaps we’ll always have a wood supply shortfall due to a lack of trees being planted or replanted, and we’ll just have to deal with rising timber prices. At the very least, we should ask businesses that sell wood or wood products to avoid buying wood from non-sustainable forests; let us stop encouraging bad behaviour. It would be fantastic if we could force irresponsible forest managers to halt or change their business operations in order to meet global demands.

We urgently require a completely sustainable timber industry with zero nett deforestation. We probably need to build a lot more steel and composite frame houses, and lowering demand will help. We must also abandon the fantasy of everyone having a large yard with their home. We also believe that we should build upwards rather than outwards, change our expectations of what a home should look like, and reduce the demand for land clearing. So, get off the couch, get out there, plant some trees, and start a conversation about what you think the answer is today.