Increasing awareness of climate change since the launch of the IPCC (2018) 1.5-degree special report has set great pressure to the aim of rapidly decreasing global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. With the increasing recognition that climate change is a serious matter causing a real crisis, public perceptions on mitigation and adaptation measures need to be studied. According to a recent study by Moran et al. (2020), changes in consumer practices and consumption patterns may reduce carbon footprints beyond business-as-usual by roughly one fourth in Europe, with primary actions targeting transport and food systems, and the building sector.
The built environment is responsible for 40% of final energy consumption, 35% of total GHG emissions, 50% of the utilization of extracted materials, and 30% of water consumption in the European Union (EU), including not only construction processes, but also the use phase of buildings (European Commission, 2011). Toward 2050, the EU carbon neutrality target will require significant measures for decarbonizing the housing stock, particularly through improving the energy efficiency of buildings. With new residential buildings already being built with strict energy efficiency requirements, lower embodied carbon building materials should be increasingly adopted in the future.
Substituting more energy-intensive and fossil-based materials, such as concrete and steel, with wood in contruction offers ways to reduce the embodied (fossil) carbon in buildings (e.g., Cabeza et al. 2014; Gustavsson et al. 2010; Upton et al. 2008). Building with wood has strong traditions in the forest-rich countries of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, with approximately 90% of detached houses constructed with wood as the load-bearing material (Schauerte 2010). Despite this, the annual market share of wood in new apartments remains at approximately 5% in Finland and 20% in Sweden (Sipiläinen 2018; Swedish Federation of Wood and Furniture Industry 2020). Due to this, efforts to promote building with wood been targeted at wooden multistory construction in residential and public buildings in both Finland and Sweden have, especially since the 1990s (Gustafsson et al. 2006). Compared with international discourse on wood construction, these aims have been similar to other countries, where the possibilities of building with wood are seen to connect particularly with the need to provide solutions for urban building (Wiegand & Ramage 2021).
The construction of multistory residential and public service buildings (such as schools and kindergartens) with wood has also been spurred by innovation in industrial prefabrication (Hildebrandt et al. 2017), referring to the off-site manufacturing of elements and components. This allows combining several work phases in a single off-site location, potentially resulting in productivity and quality gains (Malmgren 2014). The prospects for increasing wood use in urban areas have also been considered positive in Finland and Sweden (e.g., Toppinen et al. 2018), due to environmental regulation extending to include the embodied emissions of construction products and the related support measures favoring wood in public procurement.
Besides mitigation, buildings must be constructed to adapt to the changing climate-induced extreme weather, such as higher rainfall during winter months, extended heat waves, or flooding.[1] Extreme weather events are currently widely discussed by the public and in the media, with awareness of climate change and the related crisis building a momentum in society to change the existing building regimes. This connects to enhancing the use of lower carbon building materials, techniques, and solutions that perform well in changing weather conditions while supporting climate change mitigation. For example, Sisco et al. (2017) found relative abnormalities in local temperatures to generate increased awareness of climate change, and Osaka and Bellamy (2020) identified an association between climate change beliefs, personal experiences with extreme weather, and pro-environmental attitudes in respondent backgrounds. According to Bergletz and Al-Saqaf (2020), the extreme weather and climate change are increasingly co-mentioned in social media, which is indicative of improved understanding of the link between extreme weather and climate change. This is essential for legitimizing policymaking on climate change mitigation and adaptation. This publicity can create a higher level of awareness concerning climate change -induced risks and the need to adapt infrastructure for coping with extraordinary weather events. According to Lucas et al. (2021), a personal experience of extreme weather events may affect an individual’s likelihood of purchasing home insurance. In addition, climate events are likely to affect operational costs, insurance requirements, and the capital cost of building assets, and thus increase the perceived risks of rising operating and maintenance costs (Alzahrani et al. 2016).
Citizen perceptions can provide valuable information for the decision-making of construction sector professionals and for policymakers advocating a transition to a lower-carbon economy at national and regional levels. However, public views concerning the benefits of wood construction are more limited in the high-rise context and may even connect with prejudices, which relate to both building with wood in urban milieus and its technological properties as a building material (Lähtinen et al. 2019; Lähtinen et al. 2021). Connected to wood material use in construction, awareness of the need for climate change mitigation does not only concern public perceptions of timber as a building material but also the public’s requests for sustainable forest management practices in raw material procurement (Petruch and Walcher 2021). According to Viholainen et al. (2021), citizens from seven countries held multifaceted opinions regarding the technical, environmental, social, and economic aspects of using wood as a construction material. Citizens from forest-rich countries (especially Finland and Norway) emphasized different aspects compared to citizens from less-forested countries (UK, Germany, Denmark), which were more skeptical concerning the environmental ramifications of harvesting timber needed for wood materials. As a result, citizen views of wood construction may be sensitive to their engagement, either via employment or forestland ownership (Ranacher et al. 2017).
Regarding previous literature, it remains unknown whether citizens regard wood construction as beneficial from the perspective of climate change mitigation and adaptation, and how these opinions may be affected with increased occurrence of extreme weather events. Stagrum et al. (2020) reviewed literature on the effects of, and adaptation measures for climate change relating to buildings and found that evidence concerning relevant adaptation measures is limited in cold climates such as the Nordic area. Construction professionals perceive wooden structures to be more expensive to maintain (Ijäs 2013), but the cost differences between alternative materials may be decreasing due to the negative impact of extreme weather on all facade materials. Long and mild winter seasons with wet conditions could have adverse effects on wooden structures, especially on the facades, and citizen views could become averse to wood despite carbon storage benefits. Hence, from a sustainability perspective, this is a potentially “two-sided coin” situation that complicates the opinion-making of citizens: extreme weather may be a risk factor for using wood in the exterior applications of buildings and comes with increasing maintenance costs while concurrently the increase in the embodied carbon stock in the building sector is principally motivated by the urgency of climate change adaptation measures.
Our study sets out to fill the research gap through the following research questions: 1) How do citizens in Finland and Sweden perceive climate change (its origin, level of concern, and treatment in the media) and wood as a construction material under the effects of extreme weather events? and 2) What socio-demographic characteristics explain citizens’ beliefs of wood as a construction material in Sweden and Finland?
Finland and Sweden are chosen as target countries, where global warming is expected to increase the risk of heavy and slanting rains, which are especially damaging in urban areas with limited capacity for the soil to absorb excess water (see e.g. Gregow et al. 2021). For example, national climate change expert panel scenarios indicate that a combination of increased rainfall and rising average temperatures will be a likely outcome in Finland (Gregow et al. 2021), where the public commonly refers to the seasonal phenomenon as “endless November”. Most residential buildings in the Nordic countries are not typically equipped with mechanical cooling systems, and experiences from the recent 2018 heatwaves have shown the need for installing active cooling systems to avoid overheating, which is forecasted to increase energy demands toward 2050 (Farahani et al. 2021). Forest fire frequency has also increased following summer heatwaves, with several out-of-control fires in Sweden in the summer of 2018. With private family ownership being predominant in both countries, these events have been widely publicized and have caused widespread concerns.
[1] In this paper, we understand extreme weather events to also include a more gradual change in average weather that may have drastic impacts to infrastructure, such as radically increasing rainfall during the winter months.