Futurewood and Biodiversity

February 3, 2023

Futurewood is a high quality, low maintenance and environmentally friendly alternative to hardwood timber. Made from recycled industrial plastic, rice husks and recycled hardwood wood flour, futurewood combines the beauty of natural timber with the resilience of composite material. Unlike hardwood timber, it won’t rot, warp or crack so is more likely to last longer and less expensive to maintain.

Eco-friendly construction materials such as composite wood have received much attention in recent years, as they have several benefits over traditional timber products. These include the ability to avoid many of the environmental problems associated with sourcing, transporting and installing timber products such as termite and white-ant attacks, as well as being more resistant to mould, mildew and fungi.

In order to meet the increasing demands for wood in the future, forests will need to expand both planted and non-planted production. While biodiversity assessments usually focus on the impacts of deforestation, the effects of wood harvest are largely ignored, especially not in a spatially explicit manner.

However, forest production patterns are of great importance in net negative emission pathways (Chaudhary and Mooers 2018; Jantz et al. 2015), since they influence the capacity to protect biodiversity and provide ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration and water retention.

To evaluate how future forest production will impact biodiversity, we used a global approach to refine the representation of forest management by allocating future wood production to planted and non-planted forests. The approach was based on likelihood maps for planted and production forests, which were generated using data from three Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs).