Abstract

Climate change places great pressure on the construction sector to decrease its greenhouse gas emissions and to create solutions that perform well in changing weather conditions. Our study explores citizen perceptions on wood usage as a building material under expected mitigation and adaptation measures aimed at a changing climate and extreme weather events. The data are founded on an internet-based survey material collected from a consumer panel from Finland and Sweden during May–June 2021, with a total of 2015 responses. By employing exploratory factor analysis, we identified similar belief structures for the two countries, consisting of both positive and negative views on wood construction. In linear regression models for predicting these beliefs, the perceived seriousness of climate change was found to increase positive views on wood construction but was insignificant for negative views. Both in Finland and Sweden, higher familiarity with wooden multistory construction was found to connect with more positive views on the potential of wood in building, e.g., due to carbon storage and material properties. Our findings underline the potential of wood material use as one avenue of climate change adaptation in the built environment. Future research should study how citizens’ concerns for extreme weather events affect their future material preferences in their everyday living environments, also beyond the Nordic region.

Keywords

climate change adaptation; wood; residential building; extreme weather; citizen data

Published in

Canadian Journal of Forest Research
2022, Volume: 52, number: 9, pages: 1266-1279

SLU Authors

• Roos, Anders

  • Department of Forest Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Sustainable Development Goals

Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation


UKÄ Subject classification

Other Environmental Engineering
Business Administration
Climate Research


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1139/cjfr-2022-0108

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/118264