The recently released Canada Green Buildings Strategy aims to help the country decarbonize the building sector, with a massive push to upgrade and retrofit over 16 million houses and over 500,000 commercial, industrial and institutional buildings.
The strategy outlines key areas that are critical to the country achieving its goal of net-zero by 2050. One of those key areas is to change building codes to allow for taller mass timber buildings of up to 24 stories.
“With cutting-edge manufacturing technologies and sustainable forest management, our sector excels in reducing its carbon footprint and has tremendous potential to reduce the built environment’s carbon footprint while fostering economic growth,” said Rick Jeffery, president and CEO of the Canadian Wood Council, in response to the Green Building Strategy.
Mass Timber a Part of Canada’s Green Building Strategy
The use of prefabricated mass timber provides Canada with the opportunity to produce more and larger multi-unit residential buildings at lower costs, greater speeds and with lower environmental impact since mass timber is a highly sustainable building material.
This all comes on the heels of a recently published report, The Mass Timber Roadmap, which outlines how Canada could increase timber production from $379 million in 2030 to over $2.4 billion in 2045 and work towards its goal of becoming a net-zero economy by 2050.
The decarbonization of buildings as laid out in the Canada Green Buildings Strategy is also supported by the Initiative for Greening Construction with Sustainable Wood, a pledge signed by Australia, Canada, the Congo, Costa Rica, Fiji, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Japan, Kenya, Norway, Pakistan, Sweden, Ireland, the UK and the USA at COP28. This will increase the number of timber buildings constructed across the world.
Images from Depositphotos
Get the Green Building Project Checklist
Use this handy checklist on your next project to keep track of all the ways you can make your home more energy-efficient and sustainable.
