For me, this very interesting and sophisticated discussion, but it points to the impracticality of trying to solve the challenge of climate-smart wood procurement by requiring people on the demand side – architects and their clients – to make assessments of forest practices that most are not equipped or inclined to do. If they want to take it on, that’s fine, and I think it would be useful to put together some resources to facilitate that assessment, as Pat and Jacob have started to do. This could be one of our Solutions, along with another one that’s been suggested: a comparison of the relative ‘climate-smartness’ of regulations in different jurisdictions across N. America, for which Pat also pointed to a resource, but more would be needed.
But I think that one of our Solutions clearly needs to be guidance for climate-smart wood procurement that is as straightforward and user-friendly as possible, which I think is what Scott is aiming for in his document and is what I also am trying to get at in my suggested Menu. I hope we will spend more time on this once we are ready to lift our heads up from the weeds of forest management.
Another Solution could be to get some academics to set up a framework of climate-smart forestry indicators that could be used to assess the different forest certification systems. This paper has made a start at a definition and indicators:
What is Climate-Smart Forestry? A definition from a multinational collaborative process focused on mountain regions of Europe What is Climate-Smart Forestry? A definition from a multinational collaborative process focused on mountain regions of Europe - ScienceDirect
And the recent Yale study, whose summary results are here, ran a comparison of the systems that could be replicated with an emphasis on ‘climate-smartness.’
Finally, there are a number of important challenges to climate-smart wood procurement that haven’t yet been discussed, including how building professionals who want to support climate-smart forestry through procurement can convince the check-writers to pay more for climate-smart wood? I think it would be helpful for us to flesh out some other major challenges, and see if we can come up with Solutions for them. To fulfill our charge as a Working Group, we then need to try to prioritize our Solutions in terms of sequencing (does this need to happen before that can happen?) and importance/impact.