Conference Agenda

Within the European Union’s climate and resource policy frameworks, long-lived wood products play a key role in the transition towards sustainable consumption and production patterns as they store carbon for long periods of time and can substitute carbon-intensive materials. Using a discrete choice experiment, we estimated the preferences for furniture differing in material, production location, carbon footprint, and price in four distinct European contexts: Belgium (Flanders), Czech Republic, Norway and Spain. Given the limited evidence on the role of carbon footprint labelling in shaping consumer demand for wood products, we further examined how different information cues influence the market uptake of wooden furniture.

The results demonstrate social acceptance of wooden alternatives in all study regions. Respondents consistently preferred locally and European-produced furniture and showed heterogeneous preferences for carbon footprint attributes across study regions. Our findings suggests that a disclosure nudge informing about the long term carbon storage potential of wood increases preferences for solid-wood materials. Additionally, implementing a carbon labelling scheme expands demand for wood products and encourages substitution away from carbon-intensive materials, highlighting the relevance of carbon labelling as a demand-side instrument to support the development of bio-based products.