As a Norfolk boy staying in Strasbourg this week, I was naturally struck by the fact that East Anglia featured on virtually every current affairs programme on the hotel TV, from the sober Russian six o’clock news to a madcap Luxembourg magazine show.
This coverage wasn’t exactly a source of regional pride, however, as it focused on allegations that, in the run-up to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15), University of East Anglia climatologists had “edited” their findings to bolster the case for man-made global warming.
Of course, this development sparked still more intense debate between believers in climate change and the sceptics who either question whether it’s happening at all, or, if it is, whether human activity lies behind it. And it highlighted just how polarised the argument has become, with even Gordon Brown slating sceptics as “flat earthers”.
But the good news for timber is that it has a solid case to make to both sides of the global warming divide. Wood’s ability to lock in CO2 makes it the prime construction and manufacturing material for believers in man-made climate change to commend, alongside greater curbs in emissions. So it made perfect sense for the European timber trade to reinforce that point at Copenhagen in its lobbying for wood’s carbon value to be recognised in any international climate change agreement. The same goes for its calls for sustainable timber production to form part of any COP15 initiatives to preserve the global forest resource, providing, as it does, a commercial incentive not to clear woodland for other uses, plus new tree growth which increases rates of CO2 absorption.
At the same time, as was stated by a refreshingly impartial Swedish climate expert who also figured highly on European TV news this week, if not the UK’s, even if you are a climate change sceptic, with global population accelerating towards seven billion and people worldwide aspiring to western levels of consumption, sustainability remains the way to go. Whatever your “climactic religion”, he said, the arguments for “renewable energy and renewable materials, like timber” still stack up.
