Traceability & Transparency
Project Stages
Procurement Options

Traceability and transparency are necessary to establish a connection between projects and the people and forests that produce the wood products used in buildings.

A typical wood product supply chain involves mixing raw material from an endless combination of potential sources, each with wide variability in the application of climate-smart forestry practices.

The insight that grows from transparency and traceability enables building projects to identify willing partners and opportunities to link the wood in buildings to specific environmental, equity, and economic outcomes. Communication, trust and relationship-building is built between project teams, fabricators, mills, and landowners.

Pilot projects conducted to date have clarified needs, identified what is possible for each partner, and elevated the broad set of values represented by forest managers and managed forests.

Traceability and transparency are necessary to link specific products to specific forestry operations practicing CSF. CSWG Procurement Options and Project Decision Points guidance present a number of different options for sourcing CSW or otherwise supporting CSF. Each of these rely on different degrees of traceability and transparency.

Procurement options that don’t require them are generally more established and easier to exercise, but tend to be more indirect in their support of CSF. Procurement options that require traceability and transparency call for new and innovative ways to engage the supply chain and can strengthen claims of directly supporting landowners who are practicing CSF.

Benefits of Traceability & Transparency:

  • Enables a deeper connection between our buildings and the people and forests that produce the wood products.
  • Helps meet clients’ Environmental Social Governance (ESG) goals and illuminates the full range of possibilities available to meet individual project goals. Builds understanding and potential to elevate the CSF, community, conservation and equity opportunities that align with client values.
  • Creates conditions for project teams to develop deep supply chain relationships. These relationships help reduce cost and supply chain risk related to material availability and build networks contractors can leverage to secure future project bids.
  • Creates demand and elevates expectations for wood product suppliers to document and differentiate source forestry that provides enhanced climate benefits versus business-as-usual F.
  • Can more directly bring quantifiable embodied carbon factors into procurement evaluations, such as the climate impacts of shipping mass timber products over long distances.