Ten facts about forests and wood in Switzerland

1. The area of ​​Swiss forests is constantly increasing, as the two state forest inventories from the mid-1980s and the 1990s demonstrate. Today, forests cover over 30% of the country's area, and in the Jura and Ticino it is even around 40%.
2. Almost 10 million m3 of wood grows in the Swiss forest every year. This means that a cube with an edge length of almost 70 cm grows every second. If you remove bark and unusable branches, 7.4 million m3 of usable wood remains - a good one cubic meter per head of the population.
3. With over 360 m3 per hectare of forest, Switzerland has the highest wood reserves in Europe.
4. Of the growth in the Swiss forest, only around 4.5 million m3 of wood is used in a normal year.
5. Switzerland's domestic consumption of wood fluctuates around 7 million m3 per year. The utilization potential of the Swiss forest when managed sustainably is of the same magnitude - around 7.4 million m3 per year. This would allow all domestic consumption to be covered with domestic wood.
6. Carbon dioxide accounts for 84% of the greenhouse gases emitted by our country. With one ton of carbon dioxide, the forest produces more than one cubic meter of wood and stores an additional 2,800 kWh of solar energy. From 1990 to 2002, our managed forest absorbed an average of 5% of the entire Swiss CO2 emissions. In Switzerland these are more than six tonnes per person per year. Without Storm Lothar, the CO2 absorption of the Swiss forest would be around 10 percent of Swiss CO2 emissions.
7. The wood storage facilities in the Swiss building park - which contain around three quarters of the wood from the cycle of civilization - correspond to around 85 million tonnes of deposited carbon dioxide.
8. With an additional wood consumption of one million cubic meters of solid wood mass in construction, around one million tons of carbon dioxide equivalents could be saved by substituting other building materials in Switzerland.
9. With a consumption of 2.6 million m3, wood currently only covers 2.3% of Switzerland's energy consumption and 5% of its heat requirements. Local wood could heat a quarter of Swiss buildings without having to plunder the forest: 5.5 to 7 million m3 of wood could be used for this purpose per year.
10. If the use of energy wood in Switzerland were doubled - and correspondingly less oil was burned, this would reduce CO2 emissions by around 1.5 million tonnes.

Source: admin.ch