Lord Nelson’s HMS Victory has been named as one of two early-2026 pilot sites for the PEFC Project Sourcing standard, with the world’s oldest commissioned warship serving as a test bed for a new global framework that traces low-carbon timber through complex construction supply chains.
That is according to PEFC’s 2025 Annual Review, published overnight, which names the £45 million Royal Navy restoration alongside London’s Elephant Park H11B development as the first sites trialling the revised standard’s traceability requirements ahead of approval later this month.
As Wood Central reported in October 2024, the £45 million conservation programme is being supplied by Hewins Oak, WL West & Sons, and Border Hardwoods, with timber potentially sourced from PEFC-certified French forests after the National Museum of the Royal Navy turned to Britain’s historical adversary for shipbuilding-grade oak. At the time, project manager Simon Williams said France’s centuries of forest management had yielded “superiorly managed forests to the UK,” with scale and quality unavailable in local forests.
Whilst the new Project Sourcing framework builds on more than 15 years of PEFC Project Certification experience, the revised standard sets a 70 per cent certified-content threshold at both the project and component levels — with component-level certification accepted from PEFC or any other recognised scheme. The framework strengthens the link between reporting and traceability and major green building rating schemes, including LEED and BREEAM, and is calibrated for project-based procurement where chain-of-custody systems do not fully accommodate the responsibility split between principal contractors and independent subcontractors.
Built in 1759 and launched in 1765, HMS Victory remains the world’s oldest commissioned warship, with approximately 6,000 trees used in her original construction and 26 miles of rope required to rig her masts. The current conservation programme began in May 2022, after the National Museum of the Royal Navy erected scaffolding around the vessel to let her dry out, and Victory is now drier than at any point in her history.
Whilst the ship’s surface appeared sound at the start of the 2022 survey, shipwrights soon discovered that a thin skin of paint and filler masked planking that was entirely rotten on the starboard side. The vessel’s outer sound layer concealed “material that no longer resembled timber and was much closer to potting compost,” said then-project director Andrew Baines.
The decision to source French oak follows the French Crown’s 17th-century commitment to dedicate large areas of land to shipbuilding plantings, with Napoleon himself instructing further tree planting in the same period that Victory was making her name. The choice carries a significant historical irony, with Lord Nelson having branded the Forest of Dean’s state as “deplorable” in a report following his 1802 visit, demanding the Crown plant more oaks for shipbuilding.
The Victory restoration aims to be finalised by 2035, with the Royal Navy hopeful that the conservation work will extend the ship’s life by another 50 years. PEFC’s Project Sourcing standard, informed by results from the Victory and Elephant Park H11B pilots, is targeted for approval later this month.
