Growing urbanization provides new opportunities for building with wood and wood products value chains in residential, public, commercial and leisure building in Nordic countries. Multi-storey buildings with well-planned integration with built environment and transportation services as well public and house yard infrastructure built from wood, together with other materials, are currently in the focus of urban planning, but small-house areas continue to be important as well.
Harmonization of the EU standards aims to remove technical barriers to trade in the field of wooden construction and ensure the free movement of construction products across the EU. National standards and regulation policies set more specified requirements for buildings. Building codes set requirements but provide also opportunities for various business concepts, value chains and material choices for building with wood companies and wood products industries. It is recognized among Nordic countries that harmonization of building codes might be beneficial for promoting building with wood and creating new markets for wood products both from the perspective of public decision makers, builders and building companies as well as manufacturing industries in the supply chain. In this paper we present first results on benchmarking of the building codes and concepts in Finland, Sweden and Norway that affect building with wood, with some implications to the opportunities for market development among supply chains of wood-based products and general promotion of building with wood.
Keywords: wood construction, standards
Authors
Tomasz Noga
Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke)
Anuj Kumar
Erkki Verkasalo
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