Australia must build 1.2 million new homes by 2030 while cutting national greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent, and Australian Forest and Wood Innovations (AFWI) is backing new research to prove timber can deliver both at once. That is according to the University of Sunshine Coast’s National Forest and Wood Products Research Institute, which is funding the three-year project through the AFWI Centre for Sustainable Futures.
Wood Central can reveal that the project will build Australia’s first integrated, material-agnostic platform capable of quantifying embodied carbon across the residential sector, using as-built data from one million homes constructed since 2019 rather than theoretical estimates. It comes as Master Builders Australia, the nation’s peak building body and one of the project’s co-design partners, forecasts the country will finish 204,000 homes short of the National Housing Accord target just two years into the five-year agreement.
Leading the work is Rhianna Robinson, National Research and Technical Manager at the Frame and Truss Manufacturers Association of Australia, who warns that the absence of transparent, comparable carbon data is a growing risk to timber’s market access rather than a technical footnote.“We can’t manage what we can’t measure,” Robinson said, with competing materials already investing heavily in emissions reporting and decarbonisation credentials, while timber’s recognised benefits go unquantified at scale.
Embodied carbon, the emissions from manufacturing and constructing a building, is climbing the industry’s agenda as homes become more efficient to run and construction materials account for a growing share of a dwelling’s lifetime carbon. Sustainability reporting and ESG requirements are pushing builders, developers and specifiers towards reliable, comparable data to guide material selection, yet no centralised system currently measures those emissions consistently across Australian housing.
That gap carries a direct risk for timber, Robinson said, because a low-carbon material that stores biogenic carbon cannot press its advantage without credible, policy-aligned numbers to put in front of the people writing materials into projects. Timber is uniquely placed to serve both delivery and decarbonisation, she said, yet the industry lacks the centralised evidence to prove and communicate that at scale.
To close, the project will feed detailed product-level timber data into the national housing database run by partner CarbonTrace, before building a freely accessible online decision-support tool that lets users compare the carbon performance of competing materials using like-for-like Australian data. Its design deliberately moves beyond modelling to validation, Robinson said, testing timber’s performance in measured buildings rather than relying on assumptions.
For CarbonTrace, the value rests on getting that data in front of designers at the moment decisions are made, according to co-founder Tom Petty, a builder and architect who calls measurement the precondition for any credible emissions cut.
“Data is key to the decision-making around emissions reduction,” Petty said, adding that the information needs to flow into design teams without friction and, ideally, in real time.
Architects, builders, developers, manufacturers and policymakers will weigh embodied carbon across materials on the tool, which is being built to align with national certification and reporting frameworks so industry can streamline compliance rather than duplicate it. Over its three years, researchers will assemble what the project bills as Australia’s most comprehensive embodied carbon dataset for residential construction, run scenario modelling comparing timber with conventional materials, and translate the findings into practical guidance, policy recommendations and education resources.
More than 60 industry, government and research organisations have co-designed the work, among them CarbonTrace, the Frame and Truss Manufacturers Association of Australia, Hyne Group, nailplate suppliers MiTek and Multinail, the Green Building Council of Australia, CSIRO, Forest & Wood Products Australia, Timber Queensland and the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council. That breadth is designed to keep the tool tied to real industry needs while it tracks Australia’s fast-moving sustainability rules.
The project extends a push AFWI has made central to its housing agenda, after the research institute, valued at up to $200 million and backed by $100 million in federal funding, named connecting the full forest-to-market value chain as its defining opportunity. It also runs alongside the sector’s work, testing how high timber framing can go, with the Future Framing Initiative now measuring the existing system to a 15-metre upper bound across the mid-rise housing Australia must build to clear its shortfall.
Project partners estimate the education and engagement work will reach more than 80,000 industry stakeholders across Australia through their networks, delivering an online decision-support tool, technical reports, factsheets, webinars, workshops, case studies and a residential decarbonisation roadmap. The long-term aim, Robinson said, reaches past another carbon calculator to the market position timber holds once the numbers are finally in hand.
Beyond raising carbon literacy and compliance readiness across the sector, the platform is built to strengthen timber’s adoption, support net-zero housing pathways and secure it as the preferred material in Australia’s residential market, Robinson said, as the country chases a housing target it is tipped to miss by 204,000 homes while cutting emissions 43 per cent by the end of the decade.
