The worldwide lumber shortage continues to affect the building industry.


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.
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