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A 2026 study argues that wood security should sit alongside food, energy and water security on the global policy agenda. It defines wood security as “the long-term, sustainable delivery of ecosystem services provided through forest use, restoration, and conservation.” The concept covers reliable wood supplies and the carbon storage, biodiversity, climate regulation and livelihoods that forests provide.
The study’s 41 authors, from 23 institutions in 12 countries, used a modified Delphi horizon-scan at a May 2025 workshop to identify and rank 20 current and future challenges. The researchers group those challenges into five themes rather than treating timber production as a standalone supply problem.
Why wood is becoming a security issue
Forests cover roughly one-third of Earth’s land surface, hold large carbon stocks and support most terrestrial biodiversity. They also underpin a major global economy: the Cambridge report puts annual timber production at approximately US$1.5 trillion. At the same time, timber demand is expected to rise by 50% to 200% by 2050, depending on how economies, construction and bio-based products develop.
That growth collides with three pressures the research team highlights: competition for land, a changing climate and illegal timber extraction. More wood cannot simply mean converting more natural forest. Forest systems must continue supplying material while retaining ecosystem services and respecting the people who hold rights to forest land.
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Christopher Bousfield, the study’s lead author, describes the problem as a combination of “land competition and climate change” and “rampant illegal timber extraction.” David Edwards, the senior author and Cambridge’s Head of Tropical Ecology and Conservation, says global understanding of wood security still lags behind the better-established policy idea of food security.
What the 20-challenge study covers
The paper, “Twenty core challenges to global wood security in the Anthropocene,” was published in Trends Open in 2026 (DOI 10.1016/j.treopn.2026.08.021). Its 20 issues are organized under five themes:
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| Theme | What it addresses | Examples identified in the study summaries |
|---|---|---|
| Forest management, conservation and land-use change | How forests are managed, restored or converted when land is contested. | The squeeze among commercial forestry, agriculture and nature conservation. |
| Climate change and mitigation | How warming, carbon goals and climate extremes alter forest productivity and risk. | Wildfire and extreme weather that can destroy standing timber and stored carbon. |
| Policy and governance | The rules, institutions and rights that determine who can use forests and how. | Legal governance and recognition of Indigenous land tenure. |
| Monitoring and technologies | How governments and companies detect change, verify origin and measure recovery. | Combining remote sensing with long-term ground inventories to identify illegal timber and track regrowth. |
| Innovation, trade and circularity | How products, markets and supply chains reduce waste and pressure on forests. | Wood recycling, longer-lived products and more circular supply. |
Institutional summaries do not publish the complete ranked table of all 20 challenge names and scores. The examples above therefore illustrate the scope of the framework; they are not a reconstructed list of 20 rankings.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsHow wildfire threatens wood security
Wildfire is both a supply shock and an ecosystem shock. A peer-reviewed Nature Communications analysis by Bousfield and colleagues found that, between 2015 and 2022, stand-replacing fires affected 15.7 million hectares of natural production forests and 1.4 million hectares of plantations.
In temperate regions, plantations were twice as likely as natural production forests to experience a stand-replacing wildfire in that analysis. The result does not mean every plantation is more fire-prone than every natural forest; it is a regional, study-period comparison. It does show why a wood-security strategy cannot measure success only in tonnes harvested.
The wildfire authors recommend landscape-level planning, stronger fire management and greater diversity within plantations. Those measures can reduce the chance that one fire regime, species mix or age structure simultaneously removes a large share of future supply. They also protect soil, habitat and carbon recovery, which are part of wood security’s definition.
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Responses proposed by the researchers
The report presents several responses as potentially synergistic proposals, not as guarantees demonstrated by a single trial. Their value depends on local ecology, tenure, enforcement and market conditions.
| Response | Biodiversity and ecosystem services | Climate and wildfire resilience | Land-use efficiency | Legality and tenure rights | Monitoring verifiability | Circularity and product lifespan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Increase wood recycling | Can reduce demand for additional harvest when recycled fibre replaces new material; safeguards still matter for collection and contamination. | Indirect benefit by lowering pressure for new harvest; it does not prevent fires. | Uses existing material more intensively rather than requiring additional forest area. | Does not resolve tenure disputes; chain-of-custody rules remain necessary. | Traceability depends on records for recovered material and processing. | Directly strengthens circular supply. |
| Design more durable wood products | Longer service life can defer replacement harvesting. | Stores carbon in products for longer, but forests remain exposed to climate hazards. | Produces more service from each unit of harvested wood. | Requires legal sourcing even when products are durable. | Product origin and lifespan need documentation. | Directly extends product lifespan and can improve reuse. |
| Improve productive plantation yields and diversity | Could spare land for conservation if higher output is achieved without conversion or ecological degradation. | Researchers pair productivity with landscape planning, fire management and greater diversity rather than yield alone. | Potentially increases output per hectare. | Must operate within lawful tenure and Indigenous rights. | Requires inventories and remote sensing to verify area, growth and impacts. | Supplies more consistent fibre for circular markets. |
| Combine remote sensing with long-term ground inventories | Can reveal forest loss and recovery over large areas, while field data calibrate what satellites detect. | Supports earlier detection of disturbance and post-fire recovery tracking. | Improves planning without automatically changing land allocation. | Evidence is useful only when authorities enforce rights and laws. | Strongest direct contribution: repeated, cross-checked monitoring. | Can connect verified forest conditions to supply-chain records. |
| Strengthen legal governance and Indigenous land tenure | Clear rights and enforceable rules can support conservation and accountable use. | Enables coordinated fire and climate adaptation decisions. | Reduces conflict and illegal conversion rather than increasing physical area. | Directly addresses legality and tenure security. | Creates the institutional basis for credible verification. | Helps ensure recycled and new wood enter markets lawfully. |
What governments and industry need to decide
- Set a whole-forest objective. Measure timber, carbon, biodiversity, water and community benefits together instead of treating volume as the sole performance indicator.
- Map competing land claims. Planning should make the trade-offs among production, agriculture and conservation explicit before new planting or conversion is approved.
- Build a monitoring baseline. Pair satellite or other remote-sensing data with permanent ground inventories, then publish methods and update intervals so changes can be checked over time.
- Make rights and legality operational. Recognize Indigenous tenure, clarify permits and enforce against illegal extraction; a certification label cannot substitute for functioning law.
- Design for circular use. Increase recovery and recycling, specify durable products and retain material in use for as long as performance and safety allow.
- Plan for fire and extremes at landscape scale. Diversify plantations where appropriate, maintain fire-management capacity and avoid concentrating future supply in one vulnerable species or location.
What the study changes—and what it does not claim
The wood-security framework changes the question from “How much timber can forests produce?” to “How can societies secure wood and the forest services that make production possible over the long term?” It links trade, technology, land rights, climate adaptation and product design in one policy problem.
It does not provide a universal planting formula, a guaranteed wildfire solution or a single global target for recycling. Outcomes will vary by forest type, climate, governance quality and market. The study’s main contribution is to identify a shared agenda and show why those issues must be handled together rather than in separate forestry, climate and trade silos.
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