Scaling the timber construction sector - Investigations in analyzing wood market scenarios in Switzerland
The potential of wood in the construction industry with its renewability makes it a prime candidate for sustainable architecture. Timber engineering and construction concepts have immense potential to reduce carbon emissions. However, scaling-up wood construction has cross-sectoral implications and therefore, we will aim to investigate future wood market scenarios to estimate material supply and demands. As any market scenario is highly influenced by the behavior of customers/clients, we aim to consider their perspective. In this study a Wood Processing and Construction workshop is conducted and analysed, as knowledge about the decision-making behavior of market actors is required. Within the workshop with stakeholders the ARDI (Actors, Resources, Dynamics, Interactions) method is utilized. This workshop combined with interviews feeds into a survey (Discrete Choice Experiment) to define and target oriented questions, forest management scenarios and scenarios of construction value chains. We try to assess if those scenarios would be accepted by society. This paper will provide an investigation through qualitative results from interviews of the supply and demand of wood construction in Switzerland ultimately informing the future trajectory of wood market scenarios.
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June 23, 2025 - This study is published in Structures and Architecture. Authors Shayani Fernando and Janine Schweier are associated to Focus Group D, Giacomo Vaccario is associated to Focus Group A
Figure: Digital representation of the actor map
