The meeting has highlighted the growing demand for structural technical wood products in Andalusia, where an incipient industry is emerging to take advantage of local resources instead of importing them.

The Malaga town of Benarrabá, in the Genal Valley, has hosted this Friday and Saturday the first technical conference on the Wood Quality Plan of Andalusia, the result of the alliance between the Andalusian Forestry Association (AFA-Profor), the European project LIFE Wood for the Future and the DendrOlavide laboratory of the Pablo de Olavide University in Seville, with the support of the Ministry of Sustainability, Environment and Blue Economy of the Andalusian Government.

In the conference, in which the City Council of Benarrabá, the Association of Producers Marjal Chopo and the Association of Forest Owners of Eastern Andalusia (Foret) have collaborated, political, technical and social representatives have highlighted the enormous potential for development of this region, for its extraordinary forest resources, given the growing demand for wood as a raw material for sustainable construction and the emerging industry of structural wood products that is already emerging in the autonomous community.

The meeting was an opportunity to discuss forestry planning, resource use, rural development and nature conservation, within the framework of the Genal mountains, one of the most emblematic forestry regions of Andalusia.

With the main objective of promoting a new industrial ecosystem around the use of this renewable natural resource, it is also expected to promote the sustainable management of Andalusian forests and thus contribute to their true conservation, at a time when forest fires and other disturbances threaten their balance.

The professor of the University of Granada Antolino Gallego, coordinator of the LIFE Wood for the Future project, has exposed the “enormous potential” of development of this region, thanks to its forest resources and its proximity to the Costa del Sol, where there is a growing demand for wooden buildings, especially by developers and customers who come from countries of Central and Northern Europe where this type of building is very common.

“In the north of Spain and in Europe there is an exponential growth of the industries of structural technical wood, laminated and cross-laminated timber,” recalls Gallego, who stresses the contradiction of meeting the growing demand in the construction sector of wood in the South with products imported from the North, when in Andalusia, as a spin off of the University of Granada, there are extraordinary wood resources. “This conference aims to highlight the need to use local resources and to implement an Andalusian industrial ecosystem around these products”. In this sense, he has presented the first business project emerged as a spin off of the University of Granada and promoted by forest owners and researchers of Eastern Andalusia, IberoLam SL, which aims to be the germ of a factory of structural laminates of Andalusian wood.

 

In the words of Gabriel A. Gutiérrez Tejada, president of the Andalusian Forestry Association and speaker at this conference, the Andalusian Wood Quality Plan will allow “to evaluate the current and future potential productivity of the timber forest masses in our region; to define the areas of preferential use based on technological criteria and mechanization possibilities; design the best actions for the first transformation of wood; create and promote quality brands associated with the products of the different timber species (such as White Pine or Marjal Poplar); promote the management of private and public forests; and create the Register of Forest Producers of Quality Wood in Andalusia”.

And perhaps most importantly,” says Gabriel Gutiérrez Tejada, “the plan will promote the application of the necessary silviculture that allows these uses, reducing the risk of fires and other disturbances and ensuring the socio-economic development of the forest regions and the essential conservation of Andalusian forests”.

For the researchers and coordinators of the DendrOlavide laboratory of the Pablo de Olavide University, Raúl Sánchez-Salguero and Andrea Hevia, “the Wood Quality Plan is a unique opportunity to conserve Andalusian forests through sustainable forest management that generates employment. With this pioneering project we are trying to generate a roadmap in which progress is made on the quantification and classification of timber forest capital that can meet the quality requirements demanded by architects and ensure the value chain from the forest to the industry”.

At the conference, the researchers of this laboratory of dendrochronology and wood science, unique in Spain for its equipment, explained that it “is generating the first data on quality of standing timber, under its physical and mechanical properties, in order to define the first quality standards in Andalusia and ensure the revaluation of this green and renewable product”.

After the welcome by the Mayor of Benarrabá, Silvestre Barroso, the following people took part, among others: the architects Alberto de la Torre, Loris Carboni and Pablo Farfán, the president of the Association of Forest Owners of Eastern Andalusia, Marian Núñez, and, on behalf of the Department of Sustainability, Environment and Blue Economy of the Andalusian Regional Government, Rafael Romero, María José Arias and José Ramón Guzmán.