Elias HurmekoskiUniversity of Helsinki | HY · Department of Forest Sciences
Elias Hurmekoski
DSc (for.)
Substitution impacts of wood use, climate impacts of the forest sector, forest sector outlook
About
60
Publications
34,955
Reads
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1,671
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
January 2020 - present
Position
- Researcher
Description
- Substitution impacts of wood use, climate impacts of the forest sector, forest sector outlook. Title of docent awarded.
October 2018 - December 2019
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
Position
- Senior specialist
Description
- LULUCF, AFOLU, UNFCCC climate negotiations, EU council presidency
January 2012 - September 2018
Position
- Researcher
Description
- Forest economist, specialising in forest sector foresight
Education
January 2012 - March 2016
Publications
Publications (60)
Wood use generates technosphere carbon credits (TCCs) through avoided fossil‐based emissions and net sequestration of carbon into the technosphere (harvested wood products and geological storage). We investigated how large and uncertain TCCs of wood use per carbon harvested are considering the current and alternative ways of using wood, and the eff...
The management and governance of forests must consider the synergies and trade-offs between different societal goals, especially with the bioeconomy being a key factor in recent sectoral strategies worldwide. This literature review explores the multidimensional concept of synergies and trade-offs, focusing on scientific publications dealing with th...
Forest carbon stock changes are routinely reported at the national level. Such accounting usually includes carbon sequestered by live trees and stored in living and dead trees, litter, and soil. The carbon stored in harvested wood products (HWPs), while in use and after disposal, may also be reported. However, wood products may provide a further in...
Wooden construction has the potential to contribute to climate change mitigation, and it is being promoted by the EU and national governments. However, several market barriers to wood-frame multi-storey building (WMSB), have been recognized, including obstacles in national building codes, lack of expertise in wood construction, and material durabil...
Climate change poses a growing threat to European forests due to the increasing frequency and severity of storms, insect outbreaks, and other natural disturbances. Natural disturbances affect both the volume and the quality of harvested wood and increase the tendency of increased salvage loggings, reducing roundwood prices over the short-term. The...
Wood use is expanding to new markets, driven by the need to substitute fossil-intensive products and energy. Wood products can contribute to climate change mitigation, if they have a lower fossil footprint than alternative products serving the same function. However, the climate change mitigation potential is contingent on the net fossil and biogen...
People have different beliefs about the environmental impact of forest products. This quantitative web-survey study investigated public beliefs in Finland and Sweden about the environmental and climate impacts of using wood as a construction material for multi-story buildings. It was conducted with consumer panels reflecting the average populations...
Understanding landowners’ willingness to act on climate change is important for effective climate policy. This study investigates the determinants of Finnish non-industrial private forest owners’ preferences for alternative climate change mitigation strategies related to forests and wood use. The study tests hypotheses concerning the role of risk p...
This study investigated people’s requirements for multi-story housing attributes and preferences for apartments in wooden-structure versus steel/concrete-structure multi-story buildings. Data came from an online survey conducted in Finland and Sweden that screened for respondents who expressed a preference for living in an apartment, as compared wi...
The state of the world’s managed forests is determined by the societal demands for wood resources and other ecosystem services. The forest-based sector is experiencing a number of structural changes, which makes the task of looking ahead important, but challenging. One of the main trends in the forest-based industries is diversification. On one han...
Forests and wood use can contribute to climate-change mitigation by enhancing carbon sinks through afforestation, reforestation and improved forest management, by maintaining carbon stocks through natural or anthropogenic disturbance prevention, by increasing offsite carbon stocks, and through material and energy substitution by changing the indust...
Forest-based products––often referred to as harvested-wood products (HWPs)––can influence the climate through two separate mechanisms. Firstly, when wood is harvested from forests, the carbon contained in the wood is stored in the HWP for months to decades. If the amount of wood entering the market exceeds the amount of wood being discarded annuall...
Wood products may help to avoid fossil emissions when they substitute for more fossil‐intensive products. However, the estimates of avoided fossil emissions attributed to wood use tend to be based on incomplete market assumptions. Wood products are assumed to fully substitute for non‐wood products, yet substitution rarely occurs 1:1 and wood produc...
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 weath...
Background
The building and construction sectors represent a major source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Replacing concrete and steel with wood is one potential strategy to decrease emissions. On product level, the difference in fossil emissions per functional unit can be quantified with displacement factors (DFs), i.e., the amount of fossil em...
The forest-based sector is facing one the greatest transitions in its history in the face of global megatrends. Globalization, sustainability challenges and the ICT sector have put the world in a new light. Whereas some of the recent developments have resulted in challenges for the traditional forest industry, many positive expectations and opportu...
Climate change sets high pressures on the construction industry to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Due to the carbon storage properties and potential to use renewable resources efficiently, wooden multi-storey construction (WMC) is an interesting alternative for the construction industry to enhance sustainable development combined with the aesth...
Background: There is strong evidence that wood-based products are typically associated with lower fossil-based emissions over their lifecycle than functionally equivalent products made from other materials. However, the potential impact of large-scale material substitution at the market level remains challenging to quantify and is subject to assump...
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. In the urbanizing world, wood construction has been identified as one of the opportunities for mitigating these emissions. Our study explores citizen opinions on wood usag...
Despite the sustained interest in multistory wood-frame construction (WMC) along with an expanding bioeconomy, the rate of market uptake has been modest outside North America. Changing environmental values and regulation are expected to boost WMC adoption along with an expanding bioeconomy, yet the future prospects of WMC are typically explored wit...
To obtain net climate benefits from intensified forest utilization in the short-term, the substitution impact of wood harvesting and increased carbon stocks of wood-based products should be higher than the forest carbon stock loss. However, the product specific substitution impacts change dynamically over time along with technological development,...
Background
The climate impacts of wood-based products can be measured by substitution impacts and changes in product carbon stocks. Cascade use of wood aims to increase resource efficiency and minimize the impact on the environment and climate, but it may lead to changes in the product portfolios of industries. Thus, measuring the overall impact is...
This study adds to the scientific literature dealing with the climate change mitigation implications of wood substitution. Its main scientific contribution rests with the modelling approach. By fully integrating forest resource and wood-product markets modelling in quantitative scenario analysis, we account for international trade in wood products...
Cambridge Core - Ecology and Conservation - The Wicked Problem of Forest Policy - edited by William Nikolakis
The Wicked Problem of Forest Policy - edited by William Nikolakis July 2020
Forests and forest industries can contribute to climate change mitigation by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, by storing it in biomass, and by fabricating products that substitute more greenhouse gas emission intensive materials and energy. The objectives of the study are to specify alternative scenarios for the diversification of wood prod...
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on climate change provide a license to change the existing global economic model. Production and consumption needs to be transformed to be sustainable so that we can live within our planetary boundaries. An essential part of this transfo...
Circular economy may play a key role in the future success of modified wood products. The European Union (EU) aims toward a circular economy, i.e. increasing resource efficiency by waste minimization in production processes, cascade uses of materials, elimination of landfill wastes, and maximizing the value of raw materials. The policy has great ex...
We explored varying preferable utilisation patterns of wood product industries' by-products, and which actions are needed to implement them. We: (i) concluded scenarios with varying justifications in Finland towards 2030; (ii) analysed the key drivers and barriers, and (iii) evaluated the likelihood of these scenarios, and their advantages and disa...
The European forest-based sector is undergoing major changes, while, at the same time, the role of a forest-based bioeconomy is being politically discussed. The aim of this study is to elicit expert views on critical changes in the sector through an outlook towards 2030 and 2050, as well as to analyse how these views relate to the understanding of...
The aim of this study is to help build a knowledge base for the review of the EU Forest Strategy that was adopted by the European Commission in 2013. The EU Forest Strategy addresses 8 priority areas that were identified as being particularly relevant for forests and the forest-based sector until 2020. These priority areas address: (i) support of r...
Executive summary
Forests have multiple roles, but the role of forests
in climate change mitigation has become increasingly
important due to the urgent need to reduce climate
change impacts.
Forests remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
via photosynthesis, and store carbon in biomass
and soil. When forests are harvested, part of
the carbon is r...
This study identifies new wood-based products with considerable potential and attractive markets, including textiles, liquid biofuels, platform chemicals, plastics, and packaging. We apply a mixed-methods review to examine how the position of the forest industry in a given value chain determines the respective production value. An assessment is pro...
Purpose of Review
The European Union’s targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have led to the increasing demand for forest biomass in energy production, which, in turn, has raised questions about the adequacy of supply and the sustainability of forest biomass resources for energy. Although the prospects of using biomass for energy have been stu...
9.1. Introduction Forest-based industries-pulp and paper, solid wood products, and a number of downstream value-added wood-based manufacturers-have received limited attention in the pursuit of a successful implementation of EU and national bioeconomy strategies. According to Eurostat, the pulp and paper and solid wood products industries accounted...
Circular Economy, Green Economy and Bioeconomy are currently mainstreamed in academia and policy making as key sustainability concepts. These have different standpoints and possibly imply different sustainability visions. Furthermore, the three concepts are understood and applied in research and policy making in different ways, signaling a certain...
The operational environment of the forest sector is becoming more complex, and maintaining competitiveness has become increasingly complicated. At the industry or firm level, competitiveness is seen as the ability to perform better than competitors in terms of value creation over time. Relatively little is known about changes in firm-level competit...
Scenario analyses are widely used in forest sector foresight studies, being typically based on either qualitative or quantitative approaches. As scenario analyses are used for informing decision-makers, it is of interest to contrast the similarities and differences between the scenario processes and outcomes using quantitative and qualitative appro...
Industries have set ambitious targets for 2030 related to green building: Tripling the market share of wood construction, doubling the value added of the woodworking industries and reducing the environmental impact of construction by 30%. The objective of the study is to identify measures for meeting these targets, taking the case of wood-frame mul...
![Figure 3: Sawnwood consumption per capita (Based on [26])](profile/Elias-Hurmekoski-2/publication/306325041/figure/fig3/AS:397260954324999@1471725800850/Sawnwood-consumption-per-capita-Based-on-26_Q320.jpg)
Background
In terms of global forest product market developments, the twenty-first century has been in many ways very different from the twentieth century—striking structural changes have taken place. The global forest sector can be interpreted to be in a phase of creative destruction—an era characterized by a major decline of a number of establish...
Puurakentamista voidaan edistää esimerkiksi purkamalla rakennusmääräyksiä, joille ei ole teknisiä perusteita.
This report is a part of the Sustainable Bioenergy Solutions for Tomorrow (BEST) research program coordinated by FIBIC Ltd, and CLEEN Ltd. with funding from the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, Tekes.
The report in hand belongs to BEST research program’s Working Package 1 (WP1) “Bioenergy Scenarios and Strategies in Global and...
http://epublications.uef.fi/pub/urn_nbn_fi_uef-20110382/
Questions
Questions (2)
A technical question to forest products roundwood equivalent (RWE) conversion factors: For sawnwood it is easy to find the appropriate conversion factors from the FAO publications. However, for engineered wood products (and for value added wood products in general) it gets more complicated. Specifically, for CLT, it would appear to be lower than for sawnwood, I have used the factor 1.5 (meaning that it takes 1.5 m3 of wood biomass to derive 1 m3 of CLT). However, it is not clear, if this is correct or not. That is, are the CLT facilities completely separated from sawnwood production (so that one does not count the intermediate sawnwood production into this figure)? If so, the scale of the conversion factor above should be indicative. However, if one assumes that CLT is made of sawnwood coming from separate sawmills and only afterwards processed into CLT, the factor should be much higher. Any thoughts or experiences on this?
I'm looking for the amount of textile products (tons) that can be produced from a ton of dissolving pulp, and didn't find by googling?
