Humble Timber: A project for urban carbon-neutrality

A 9-actor alliance has formed in Finland to provide a tangible way forward for a carbon-neutral urban environment. The alliance, called Humble Timber, presents an opportunity to build long-lasting and sustainable cross-sector collaboration that will speed up the adoption of timber in Finnish construction. 

 

Finland has a strong commitment to meet ambitious carbon neutrality targets by 2035. Cities like Helsinki, Vantaa and Uusimaa have to reach net-zero by 2030. At the same time, cities have ambitious housing targets, but concrete and steel are still far from being net-zero materials. That is why the Finnish government has commited to doubling the construction of timber buildings. 

 

However, there is currently no clear picture of timber production capacity and its potential. Cities thus can’t be too ambitious in demanding it, leading to weak demand signals that affect the industry. 

 

To get out of this deadlock, we have launched the Humble Timber alliance. Demos Helsinki is responsible for this process, by employing the Humble Governance model. 

 

Why humble?

The Humble Governance model infuses governance with humility — an essential ingredient when we are solving problems for which we have no known best practices. The transition to timber construction presents such a problem: there is no historical knowledge on a fullscale shift that spans across multiple industries. The model works in four phases to faciliate timber transition: 

 

Phase 1. Strike a thin consensus: Identify common problems and steer the conversation towards meaningful, solution-driven collaboration. This has already been completed, and you can read about the results here. 

Phase 2. Devolve problem-solving: Prioritise and organise the pressing issues that come out of phase 1. Then, divide the alliance into groups that will work on these issues. Here are the issues that we will be working on in this second phase.  

Phase 3. Peer-learning: Test previously identified solutions and introduce evidence from the second phase. 

Phase 4. Revision of framework goals: Based on the learnings from phase 3, identify policies and partnerships between organisations that support the goals set in phase 1 consensus. 

 

Our hypothesis is that the thin consensus will have become thicker by the end of this process, leading to tangible steps forward for the timber transition.

 

The alliance members are the Finnish Ministry of Environment, the Helsinki-Uusimaa regional council, the City of Helsinki, the Federation of Woodworking Industries, Y-Foundation, Woodcomp, VAV, Skanska, and Bonava. 

 

The results of the project, including visions and actions for timber transition, have been published (currently only in Finnish).  See what happened at the publication event, where Finland’s Minister for the Environment and Climate Change, Emma Kari, emphasised the potential of the humble governance model, stating that the timing for a timber transition is now.

 

Impact update

The alliance successfully identified the bottlenecks of timber transition in Finland and worked collaboratively to decide on solutions while also delegating responsibilities to the relevant actors. Read more about the project’s results here.

 

• Read the article written for this project by the Helsinki region of Uusimaa.

 

For more information please contact:

Otto-Wille Koste
Expert
otto-wille.koste@demoshelsinki.fi
+358405217122

 

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Feature Image: Sergey Lapunin / Unsplash