Creating the Wood Supply of the Future

Abstract

Global demand for wood as a raw material is growing with a projected annual increase in industrial roundwood consumption of between 1.3 % and 1.8 % up to 2030. This rise is driven by the projected growth in the world’s population and economic activity. Much of the increased consumption will be in the rapidly expanding economies of China, India and south-east Asia and the escalating use of wood for biomass, particularly in Europe. The potential to expand forestry will be limited in the region of highest growth (Asia and the Pacific rim, with the exception of China) because of competing land-uses and high population densities. In addition there is an ever increasing requirement for forests to provide a range of environmental services such as helping to provide clean air and water, protecting existing biodiversity and this has led to an ever expanding area of protected forests across the globe. The result of these pressures on forestry is that there will be ever more reliance on managed forests, particularly planted forests, in order to satisfy this increasing demand for wood. While much of the product demand will remain as at present there will be an additional need for more wood in rapidly expanding sectors such as biomass and engineered wood products. This means that forests need to produce more wood per unit area and these wood products need to be more carefully designed to meet the increasing expectations of end users around product performance. This is partly driven by the performance levels of competing materials. Although this sounds daunting the methods and tools are available to make this a reality, but it will require forestry and the forest/wood chain to respond by adopting technologies and techniques that modernise the production and allocation of wood products along the whole production chain from forest to final end use. Expanding wood production in line with predicted global demand is entirely possible with the use of genetically improved material and management focussed on production and reducing losses from biotic and abiotic agents. The challenge is to do this in a manner that allows production to remain “sustainable” for the foreseeable future. At the same time the technology exists to make much more focussed use of the material from the forest with allocation decisions taking place as early as possible in the wood chain. In addition information on physical properties will be “tagged” to the material so that informed decisions can be made at every stage along the processing chain. The technologies available include aerial and satellite remote sensing (in particular with LiDAR), ground based scanning, acoustic technology, x-ray scanning, NMR scanning and Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). In this chapter we discuss how by combining improved productivity and improved allocation within the wood chain through the use of modern information systems it will be possible to meet the wood supply demands of the twenty-first century. The forest will become an integrated part of the wood chain with the volume and properties of the material well characterised and available at every stage of the journey from the forest to the final product. Challenges and Opportunities for the World's Forests in the 21st Century Challenges and Opportunities for the World's Forests in the 21st Century Look