Climate-friendly wooden buildings rise across U.S. and Europe

The year 2025 is “pivotal” for mass timber construction, which is growing at around 20 percent a year.

While sustainable solutions are facing drastic funding cuts and even outright opposition, mass timber as a sustainable construction material is steadily gaining traction across the United States.

Construction using mass timber began in 2015 in the U.S., and since then the number of projects has grown about 20 percent annually. Today, over 2,500 mass timber projects are built or in progress in the U.S., including corporate offices for companies such as Google, Microsoft and Under Armour.

Buildings and construction account for 37 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2023 report by the United Nations Environment Program. The production of cement and steel for construction accounts for 11 percent of global emissions. 

Mass timber is made of layers of lumber glued together to form a single, strong beam. The two most common varieties are cross-laminated timber, where lumber boards alternate directions as they are stacked, like a Jenga tower, and glue-laminated timber where boards are stacked in parallel.

Replacing conventional building materials with mass timber has the potential to reduce global emissions by 14 percent to 31 percent, according to the U.N. report — including from carbon stored in the wood, displacing fossil fuels and less carbon-intensive production and construction methods.

Mass timber usage rises in U.S., European building construction