Humanity faces a triple challenge: ensuring the well-being of a growing population, addressing climate change, and reversing biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. A sustainable, circular bioeconomy offers a powerful solution by tackling harmful patterns of over-consumption and excessive material production. It is one key step toward reversing environmental degradation and building a more resilient future.
Over the past century, wood has been replaced by materials like steel, concrete, and plastics for their strength, fire resistance, and ability to be shaped. However, emerging innovations are unlocking new possibilities for wood, which were unimaginable before. Wood can now be made as hard as steel and used in skyscrapers, or transformed to become soft, pliable, transparent, or even conductive. These advances open doors for wood-based products in various sectors, from chemistry to construction, offering properties similar to fossil-fuel-based materials but with the added benefits of being carbon-neutral, biodegradable, and renewable when forest and tree resources are sustainably managed.
Thanks to cutting-edge technologies, a range of new wood-based products is being developed. These include lignin to replace fossil-based materials, ethanol from sawdust and wood waste, bioplastics, nanofibers, and bio-oils. Innovative industrial processes are continuously being developed to replace harmful chemicals used in wood treatment, which are toxic to humans and harmful to the environment. Such innovative processes can also aim to improve productivity, energy- and resource- use efficiency along wood-based product value chains, while also preventing, reducing or reusing wood waste in a circular bioeconomy, including combustion for bioenergy as the final step of a suite of cascading uses of wood. The sustainable management of forest and tree resources results in a broad array of wood products and helps reduce environmental impacts by substituting energy- and carbon-intensive materials like steel, cement and plastics. Not least, forests, trees and wood-based products offer a long-term storage for carbon, both above and below ground.
This open call for contributions aims to explore these various uses of wood as well as their multiple impacts for sustainable development.
We invite contributions from interested scientists and professionals in wood technology and wood-based product value chains, from research and academic institutions, technology institutes, and private companies. We especially invite young contributors – the wood future is yours!
We intend to put this material together as individual contributions to a CIFOR-ICRAF publication. Due reference will be given to all authors.
Beyond that, we will provide significant visibility to the best contributions received. This could include organizing a dedicated session at an upcoming academic or international event, or blogs written to promote the best contributions, among other options.
Milestones and timeline:
- 25 October 2024 – The online call is open.
- 8 November 2024 – Share your quick manifestation of interest including: author(s) name(s) and organization(s), tentative title of the contribution, and one sentence describing the issue covered.
- 17 January 2025 – Share your 200-word abstract.
The authors of the best abstracts will then be invited to develop a full paper. The best papers will be compiled in a CIFOR-ICRAF occasional paper and publicized, as appropriate, in forthcoming academic events and other international conferences.
