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The timber industry is reeling from ‘whiplash’ as high interest rates and sluggish new home construction have dried up demand following a boom period during the past several years. Source: The Australian In the long run, however, the forestry industry peak body said it needed support to expand soft­wood plantations, which took a significant hit during the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires. It said Australia faced a “supply cliff’ if it was to meet its housing targets as the nation struggled to keep pace with housing needs. At the centre of this double whammy is Tumut, a town of just under 7000, two hours west of Canberra in regional. NSW. It is situated in the Murray Valley, which itself was the nation’s sec­ond most productive softwood region – 18% of national production before the Black Summer fires, according to the federal agriculture department. “This facility was processing 500,000 cubic metres of logs, today we process 250,000,” AKD Softwoods chief executive Shane Vicary said at the company’s Tumut mill. AKD is the largest sawmill company in the country, produc­ing about a quarter of the nation’s timber consumption, according to Mr Vicary. “This mill is doing half the volume that it used to do, and it’ll do half for the next 20-plus years, based on the fact that those logs got burnt,” he said. Despite this dramatic re­duction in production, timber continued to sit on the shelf with­out being sold, he said. “We can’t get enough people to buy the timber,” he said. “At the moment, most of our employees are earning less because there’s less activity: we’ve got overtime bans, we’ve got employment freezes.” Long-time Tumut timber worker and CFMEU NSW manu­facturing president Sharon Mus­son said the industry was vital for Tumut. “It’s a trickle-down effect,” she said. “The whole structure of fam­ilies, they rely on the timber com­ing through. “We’ve got one family, there’s eight people all related to each other working together – you know, uncles, brothers, sons. “For them to lose their jobs, it wouldn’t just be the impact of one person losing their pay.” Mr Vicary said reduced supply and demand made them weaker. “You become more fragile,” he said. “You become a smaller oper­ation. You become more suscep­tible to cold winds. “The irony of our situation at a time when we need to be building more houses … we need the state governments to be investing in more infrastructure to enable more suburbs.” Australian Forest Products Association NSW chief executive James Jooste said the conditions for the industry had to stabilise amid the headwinds, especially if the nation was to meet its housing targets. “There is no other solution to meeting our housing needs other than making sure we have a stable supply of timber, and the demand needs to be stabilised,” he said. “It’s so important that we make sure that when we have these am­bitious targets, we also have a plan and a road map to get there, but under pining that all is making sure over the next 20, 30, 40 years we have a consistent supply of domestic Australian timber to meet those needs because timber. goes into 90 per cent of the new detached houses built every year.” The federal government has previously laid out ambitions to build 1.2 million new homes in the next five years. NSW Premier Chris Minns recently admitted the state would not meet its target this year. The Australian earlier this month reported construction industry chiefs warned the country was not on track to meet the target. “Targets are just targets without action so we need to make sure that we’re not seeing this boom-­and-bust cycle continue in our housing construction industry,” Mr Jooste said. ”We need an even pathway and we need investment in our most important material in that housing construction cycle, which is timber.”

Since the last ice age, the Earth’s forest cover has fallen by 20 million km2 or 2 billion hectares. Half of the loss occurred since the year 1900 due to expanding agriculture and industrialization. Source: Visual Capitalist Now forests cover about 30% of the Earth’s land, about 40 million km2, distributed unevenly across the globe. Data for article comes from the World Bank, using data for 2021 that was last updated in October 2023. Predictably, the largest country in the world also has the biggest forest area. Nearly 50% of Russia is forest, measuring roughly 8 million km2. This is bigger than the total land area of every other country in the world with the exception of China, the US, Canada, Brazil, and Australia. It also means one-fifth of the world’s entire forested area is in Russia. Most of Russia’s forests are boreal, to survive the colder, drier climes in the country, and are made up of deciduous and coniferous tree species including larch, pine, spruce, and oak. At second place, Brazil has nearly 5 million km2 of forest cover (about 12% of the world’s forests), thanks to almost two-thirds of the Amazon rainforest inside its borders. For context, Brazil’s forested area is almost twice the size of Saudi Arabia, the 12th largest country in the world. The Amazon also contributes significantly to Peru’s forest cover (ranked 10th on this list) along with Colombia (13th) Bolivia (14th) and Venezuela (15th). Canada and the US, rank third and fourth with roughly the same forest cover, 3 million km2 with several forests on both coasts extending across their shared border. China rounds out the top five, its forests covering slightly more than 2 million km2. Together the top five countries account for more than half of the world’s forests. When taking in the top 10, which adds in forest cover from Australia, the DRC, Indonesia, India, and Peru, this grows to slightly more than two-third’s of the world’s forests. Expanding the ranks to the top 20 will then accounts for 80% of the Earth’s total forest cover. Not all forests are created equal. Primary forests, forests undisturbed by human activity are better carbon sinks and have greater biodiversity than human-planted ones. Here’s how each country’s forest cover is divided between primary and naturally-regenerating forests (forest where there are clearly visible indications of human activities but are now slowly reverting back to their natural state) and human–planted ones. In countries like Bahrain and Kuwait, areas of extreme aridity, where forests would not occur naturally, human-planted forests account for all forest cover. But even across large parts of Europe, planted forests vastly outnumber primary and naturally-regenerated ones, indicating how much deforestation occurred on the continent in the last three centuries, which is now being steadily reversed. In China, which increased its forest cover by the size of Norway in the last three decades, nearly 40% of the total forested area is planted. Experts say that reversing forest degradation and protecting primary forests, holders of an incredible amount of carbon that would be released into the atmosphere when logged should be prioritized instead of just planting new forests. The full article with tables is at https://www.visualcapitalist.com/which-countries-have-the-largest-forests/

Tigercat Industries has built and shipped its 30,000th machine, just over 30 years into its existence. From humble beginnings in 1992 when Tigercat had a single product, very little dealer representation, and produced just a handful of machines, the company has grown steadily, expanding both its production capacity and product breadth. Source: Timberbiz Tigercat debuted the 726 feller buncher in April 1992 at a forestry equipment show in Quitman Georgia. By 1995, Tigercat had two drive-to-tree feller bunchers, two track feller bunchers, and two bunching shear models with distribution in Canada and the United States. By 1997, Tigercat had a full product line to offer southern US dealers with the addition of a knuckleboom loader and the industry’s first successful, serial production hydrostatic skidder. In 2000, Tigercat was well on its way to becoming the dominant player in steep slope harvesting applications, offering a six-wheel drive skidder and the L830 feller buncher. Both were destined to become flagship products for the company. In addition, Tigercat entered the vegetation management sector with its first mulcher carrier. The range of carriers and attachments that have followed are crucial inputs to wildfire mitigation strategies in many regions globally. By 2005, Tigercat was present in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, UK and Sweden among other countries. In 2012 Tigercat had grown in 20 years from two to 1000 employees and introduced the 880 logger, the first in a series of versatile, forest duty swing machines. Today, Tigercat has the most complete full-tree product line-up in the industry, along with a growing range of CTL harvesters, forwarders and harvesting heads. In 2022 Tigercat launched a new brand, TCi and put the TCi badge on its first dozer, the 920. In the last four years, the company has been developing a line of material processing products with two launches to date, the 6500 chipper and 6900 grinder. Tigercat recently opened a new facility dedicated to the material processing product line and is currently building an additional facility. When complete the company will have over 1.4 million square feet of manufacturing capacity. That’s 130 000 square metres or 32 acres under roof. Over 160 dealer locations in 25 countries represent the Tigercat and TCi brands, along with an extensive factory support network. The company employs more than 2000.  

  Climate change is a major priority for the Biden administration, which has set a goal to reach net zero emissions by no later than 2050. As the army works to meet these goals and accomplish the objectives set in its own Climate Strategy, it has begun to focus more attention on one of its biggest emissions drivers: construction activities related to its vast inventory of buildings. Source: Timberbiz Embodied emissions, which occur during construction because of material manufacturing, transportation and assembly account for up to 10% of global emissions, according to the New Building Institute. Possessing the most buildings in the federal government, the Army has an opportunity to greatly reduce emissions by integrating sustainable materials in future construction projects and developing standards that enable others to do the same. The US Army Engineer Research and Development Centre (ERDC) is helping lead this charge through cutting-edge research to develop new materials, analysis tools and design guidance specifications. ERDC is also leading tri-service coordination of all pilot project activities and guidance updates. “ERDC material research in sustainable materials will inform our designers, and the construction industry as whole, how innovative materials can replace current materials with alternatives that are resilient and have low impact on the environment,” says Ed Citzler, Senior Architect and Engineering and Construction Sustainability Lead at the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). ERDC is directly involved with four tri-service pilot projects focused on using sustainable materials in construction, including three that were Congressionally directed in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). ERDC is supplying subject-matter expertise through rigorous demonstrations and close collaboration with other government, academic and industry experts, as well as supporting project delivery and high-level tri-service coordination. It is also performing lifecycle analyses and cost assessments of these innovative pilots to determine broader applicability. “ERDC worked with each of the services to do a rack and stack of upcoming MILCON (military construction) projects and look across those to see what would be feasible for us to make a big splash and impact in sustainable materials while not introducing a lot of risk into the project,” said Dr Robert Moser, ERDC Senior Scientific Technical Manager for Materials, Manufacturing and Structures. Moser noted special care had to be given to balance improved sustainability with the need to meet the military’s elevated force protection and performance standards. That’s where ERDC’s world-class expertise in materials and force protection played an important role. “That is the big balance point we have,” Dr Moser said. “We still have to deliver these projects and we don’t want to make sacrifices either based on cost that jeopardize the number of projects we can build or based on performance that jeopardize the resilience for the mission. “But there are ways we can effectively integrate these and get at those sustainability goals and use the buying power of the government to lead industry to some of these trends.” These efforts also align with President Biden’s Federal Buy Clean Initiative, which aims to leverage the buying power of the federal government to propel the market for clean construction materials in federal infrastructure projects. “ERDC’s research programs are contributing to our collective knowledge base on leading-edge, low-carbon construction materials,” said Andrew Mayock, co-chair of the Federal Buy Clean Initiative and Federal Chief Sustainability Officer with the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “By increasing research in and use of American-made low-carbon concrete, asphalt, steel and glass products across the federal government, we can further innovation, scale up commercialization and deployment, and catalyse markets for clean construction materials.” Two of the pilot projects involve the construction of different Unaccompanied Enlisted Personnel Housing (or barracks) at Joint Base Lewis McChord (JBLM) in Washington state. One, directed by the NDAA, modified nine different construction specifications to use more sustainable materials. This included new types of more sustainable concrete, new insulation and roofing materials, and a redesign of the building’s exterior to use fewer bricks. “I’ve never seen a project where we accelerated that rapidly, directly working with the design team,” Moser said. “The modified design has the same engineering performance requirements and durability requirements. We are just reducing the embodied energy by using a different material.” The other JBLM project, directed by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment, calls for maximum use of mass timber in structural and architectural features. Mass timber uses special processes and new technology to bind wood products together in layers, creating a strong and durable material that is also more sustainable than steel or concrete. Because mass timber is so new, the project required extensive ERDC research into its feasibility for military construction. As part of the effort, ERDC developed new USACE design guidance on mass timber usage that will enable greater incorporation in projects across the country. “We want to demonstrate mass timber as a practical and sustainable material for military construction projects,” Moser said. “I think a big win will be if we can extensively use mass timber in this project, and along with doing that, demonstrate in a normal military construction project and the way we do business (…) that we worked through the whole design flow with our people and our language so it can inform upcoming updates that will maybe take down some of the barriers that limit us using these materials in projects,” Moser said. “I think that’s the big goal.” The other two pilot projects, both directed by the NDAA, include a communications facility for the Air Force/Space Force and a child development centre for the Navy. One focuses on concrete sustainability and the other on mass timber.