Health and Wellbeing in Timber Buildings: Insights and Research Needs

This policy brief, which follows the workshop ‘Health and Well-being in Timber Buildings’ held at the 29th International Wood Construction Conference in Innsbruck on 3 December 2025, summarises the current state of research in this field and sets out the steps needed to develop more robust scientific evidence. 

Key messages are presented in 4 points:

1. Current research shows promising results that indoor wood use contributes to a variety of psychological and physiological benefits in addition to contributing comfort via the materials relationship with moisture.
2. Wood use indoors fits well with current policy initiatives like New European Bauhaus (NEB) and the Clean Industrial Deal, amongst others.
3. Significantly more research is needed to validate these results. Various considerations can be made to improve quality in future studies.
4. Access to research funding is a key limitation to robust, larger studies and studies in real environments, greater interdisciplinary and international cooperation.