Jackson Morrill
President & CEO of the American Wood Council
Four years ago, the United States was not involved in setting international standards on the wood products industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. International standards are developed through a consensus and collaborative process, and without U.S. involvement, important standards for our industry may not accurately reflect U.S. wood products’ benefits, forest landownership patterns and harvest practices. The American Wood Council (AWC) and its members recognized that the U.S. wood products industry needed a voice in developing these international standards and secured our industry’s participation and ability to shape them.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) began development of the ISO 13391 series four years ago. This standard series focuses on greenhouse gas dynamics for wood and wood-based products. The ISO 13391 series consists of three standards (13391-1, 13391-2, and 13391-3) that cover several components related to wood products production, including value chain emissions, contribution to the harvested wood products pool, forest carbon balance, and potential displacement effects.
When development for this series began, there was no U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for Technical Committee 287 (TC287), meaning there was no pathway for AWC, or the U.S. wood products sector to meaningfully participate in its development. AWC, and our member companies, understood the importance of our industry’s involvement in this standard’s development to ensure international alignment with accepted U.S. methodologies and practices for forestry and wood product manufacturing.
AWC successfully created the TAG to TC287 in 2023, securing the U.S. industry’s participation in the development of these standards. Since the creation of the TAG, AWC has led the U.S. delegation through the series development process. In addition to AWC, the U.S. delegation included landowners, wood product manufacturers, universities, federal agencies, and paper manufacturers.
As part of leading the TAG, AWC collaborated with experts from the U.S. and other country delegations involved in Working Group 3 on Sustainable Processes for Wood and Wood Based Products. The group held meetings over the last several years to arrive at a consensus agreement on the content, methodologies and requirements for the standard series. AWC hosted one of the Working Group meetings in January 2024 in Washington, D.C., where international experts discussed specific revisions of the Committee Draft (CD). Several months later, AWC joined the meeting hosted by the Canadian delegation in Ottawa to resolve comments on the Draft International Standard (DIS). Once all comments were resolved, the standard was registered as a Final Draft International Standard (FDIS), which passed a country vote and was officially published April 28. Additional technical reports that accompany the standard series were published in May.
With publication, the 13391 series now serves as a tool that can be used to demonstrate the benefits of wood products, including carbon storage and low embodied carbon benefits of wood products. It provides a standardized and internationally agreed upon approach to calculating and communicating the greenhouse gas dynamics for a set of wood products.
Part 1 lays out a holistic framework to address and report the components and requirements for calculating the value chain emissions and contribution to the harvested wood products pool. Part 2 gives the requirements for calculating and reporting the forest carbon balance associated with wood products, and Part 3 provides requirements for calculating and reporting the potential displacement.
The finalization of the series offers potential as an alternative to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for organizational greenhouse gas reporting. AWC’s creation of the TAG and active role in development of these standards ensured that the U.S. had a voice in their creation.
Thanks to their successful completion, the U.S. industry now has a viable alternative reporting methodology that more accurately represents carbon flows in wood products, including the recognition of stored biogenic carbon. This will improve corporate reporting, sustainability standards development, and ultimately set a precedent for fully recognizing the carbon benefits of wood products. This is a great initial win for our industry, but we will now need to focus on how best to support the roll out and use of the new ISO standard. This will pose its own set of challenges, and we look forward to working with our member companies and partner organizations to move this important standard forward into use.
