As George Orwell noted, “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle”, hence it is not surprising that although timber offers a significant solution to climate change very few people realize this. As I have argued, timber is the material we must use to replace our main carbon-intensive construction materials, especially concrete and steel. It can both substitute for these materials and safely store carbon. To help us understand timber, and why it has such potential to help us, we should visit the forest. This book is pro-timber, but also very much pro-forest.

Almost a third of the world's land surface is covered by forests. Europe's forest cover is 35 per cent – over a third of the continent. UK forest cover stands at 13 per cent. Within the EU Finland (74 per cent of total land area) and Sweden (69 per cent) are the most heavily forested countries, followed by Slovenia (61 per cent), Estonia (57 per cent) and Latvia (55 per cent). The Netherlands (11 per cent), Ireland (11 per cent) and Malta (1 per cent) are the least forested countries. If we consider things at a European level – which brings in the Russian Federation, Norway, Switzerland, Ukraine, Belarus, etc. – then forest cover is around 1,000 million hectares, which is about 30 times the size of Poland (see Figure 6.1). The largest forest area in this wider geography is located in the Russian Federation.

All trees – big or small, deciduous or coniferous, on their own or with other trees in a forest – have the ability to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and exhale oxygen in return, which is why forests are often rightly referred to as “the lungs of the earth”. However, as Harald Mauser of the European Forest Institute points out, “This is reversed when trees are dead and decay. This releases almost all the CO2 they stored except a very small part that was transferred to the soil via litter and roots”.