Good news for the future of wooden cities: recent study paints a rosy outlook on resources.

The wooden city is no longer some far-off concept. Two years ago, Milwaukee’s 25-storey Ascent high-rise edged out Norway’s Mjøstårnet as the tallest mass timber building in the world. The Ascent will be surpassed this year by another building just a mile away—the Edison, a 32-storey luxury apartment tower—which, in turn, will find itself in the shadow of yet a third Milwaukee monument now being planned, this one climbing 55 storeys.

But the trend goes well beyond Brew City. From Amsterdam to Zanzibar, there are now more than fifty such buildings exceeding 100 feet in height, and in the U.S. alone there are some 1,500 mass-timber buildings already constructed or in the works. According to a University of Georgia study, demand for timber is projected to grow 25-fold in the next fifty years.

The dawn of the wooden urban center is driven in no small part by its potential for climate change mitigation. In a study published in Nature Communications, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found that replacing conventional steel-and-concrete construction with mass timber could prevent more than 100 billion tons of CO2 emissions by 2100—that’s about 10 percent of the remaining carbon budget for the 2°C target central to the Paris Climate Accord.

Better still, the study goes a long way toward assuaging concerns that resourcing so much wood would necessarily impact biodiversity or threaten other resources. “Our simulation shows that sufficient wood for new mid-rise urban buildings can be produced without major repercussion on food production,” says co-author Florian Humpenöder. If managed carefully, the approximately 140 million hectares necessary for such a transformation could be “established on harvested forest areas and thus not at the cost of agricultural land.”

With this in mind, we were all the more delighted by a fascinating hour-long episode of “Engineering The Future,” a documentary series produced by Curiosity Stream. Narrated by actor David Oyelowo, Timber Skyscraper delves deep on the subject, examining everything from shipping logistics and fire mitigation to lignin insulation and wooden glass for windows. It’s a must-see for anyone with a passing interest in the future of mass timber.

Documentary: Timber Skyscraper (”Engineering The Future”)

Study: “Living in timber cities could cut emissions, without using farmland for wood production” [Science Daily]

Study: “The potential use of mass timber in mid-to high-rise construction and the associated carbon benefits in the United States” [PLOS One]

ArchDaily (Top image): “Snøhetta and Heatherwick Design a Timber City for Sidewalk Labs [ArchDaily]