How much wood do we really burn?

According to the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) we burn, on average, 40% of all the wood harvested annually. In 2022, we burnt slightly more — 41% or 2.31 million m3 of the 5.18 million m3 produced — which represents an increase of 7% compared to 2021 and a doubling in the last 20 years. 

As we have seen however, FSO figures only count “natural wood” (logs and woodchips) as energy wood. But add all the other assortments and we burnt more wood (5,41 million m3 with climatic correction, 5.88 million m3 without, see below for an explanation of this term) in 2022 than the entire forestry sector produced (5.18 million m3), according to Swiss Federal Office for Energy (SFOE) data.

Let’s repeat that: in 2022, Switzerland burnt more wood than its entire forestry industry produced.

Of the 5.25 million m3 of wood sold in 2022 (or 5.98 million m3 with climatic correction), 59.4% came from “natural wood” (logs and woodchips); 12.9% came from “wood residues”; 14.4% came from “reclaimed wood” and 13.2% came from “wood pellets”.

And because only 5.3% of our energy came from imported wood that year, this means that the rest was all Swiss wood. And of this only 14.4% came from “reclaimed wood”, which is what the government claims we should be burning in the “optimised cascade”. The rest — 80.3% (85.6% minus 5.3%) came directly from trees felled in Switzerland.   

In other words, in 2022, we burnt 4,159,539 million m3 of wood derived directly from Swiss forests, parks, gardens and hedgerows.

That is a lot of trees. 

And it’s probably an underestimate, not just because wood harvests are often underreported, but because energy consumption is calculated and adapted depending on climatic conditions. This is the famous climatic correction mentioned above. You can find out more about such adjustment for climatic conditions and the methods used to calculate them here. 

Finally, you may be wondering how can wood burning be going up when the overall number of wood burners is going down? It is simply because traditional domestic fireplaces and wood ovens are being replaced with larger burners and district heating systems that heat entire buildings and multiple homes. Such automatic systems burn day and night.

And they require and will require a lot more wood.