The Benefits of Constructing More Timber Buildings in New Zealand

This presentation gives a big-picture overview of embodied carbon in the New Zealand building construction industry.

It describes the results of a recent project to quantify the carbon benefits of increasing the number of timber buildings in New Zealand.

The presentation shows the number of buildings constructed in New Zealand each year, with estimates of the main structural building materials, the resulting carbon emissions, and the impacts of replacing much of the steel and concrete with structural timber.

This study is not a full Life Cycle Analysis. The calculations are restricted to an assessment of the embodied CO2-e emissions from construction of the buildings. The report was written for Te Uru Rākau, New Zealand Forest Service, Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), as an update of Andy’s 1999 paper on Wood-based building materials and atmospheric carbon emissions.