Dr. Asselia Katenbayeva, Sustainability Research Lead, at the Alliance for Sustainable Building Products (ASBP), outlines the recently launched project that aims to better understand damage assessment and repair of mass timber buildings.
Since the launch of the Mass Timber Insurance Playbook, insurers have become more confident in insuring timber buildings. The Playbook brought designers, insurers, and fire experts into a single, structured conversation. This has been a real step forward for the timber sector. However, barriers to scaling up mass timber remain. One of the most pressing is damage assessment and repair. When things go wrong, as can happen with any building type, what are the procedures for assessing the damage and selecting repair methods?
For steel and concrete, the industry can draw on long-established protocols and reasonably predictable cost models. For mass timber, the equivalent shared evidence is still developing. A new project led by the ASBP is set to address this. The aim is to give engineers, specifiers, contractors, and insurers a clearer framework when damage occurs, and to enable repair options to be anticipated and discussed with insurers in advance, so that buildings become more insurable.
Building on the Mass Timber Insurance Playbook
This project builds directly on the Mass Timber Insurance Playbook, giving a clear thread of continuity from the earlier insurance work into damage assessment and repair. ASBP is leading and managing the project. The project started in January 2026 and will run for 14 months.
One of the key strengths of this project is the breadth of expertise within the team. Technical direction is provided by Jim Glockling, co-author of the Mass Timber Insurance Playbook. Implementing partners include TIAS, KLH, Eurban, Lignum Risk Partners, Ramboll, Elliott Wood, and Buro Happold. The wider stakeholder group includes insurers and brokers, the Association of British Insurers, B&K Hybrid Solutions, Heyne Tillett Steel, Engenuiti, Architype, Waugh Thistleton Architects, the Structural Timber Association, BE-ST, Timber Innovation from Baden-Wurttemberg in Germany, and Byggeskadefonden in Denmark. This cross-sector input is essential to ensure the guidance is technically robust, credible to insurers, and practical for those designing and delivering mass timber buildings. The project is funded by Built by Nature, with co-funding from RISCAuthority and PEFC UK.
Why this matters for the sector
For steel and concrete, engineers, insurers, and contractors share a substantial body of established evidence about what to test, what counts as proportionate repair, and what the likely costs and timescales are. For mass timber, that shared evidence is still developing. Damage from fire, smoke, water, moisture, infestation, or fungal rot can behave differently from one structure to the next, and the available guidance is fragmented.
This uncertainty has practical consequences for projects. Where repair routes are unclear, schemes may default to non-biobased materials, even where mass timber delivers substantial carbon and wider environmental benefits. Insurers also tend to assume worstcase loss outcomes, which feeds into pricing and availability. Reducing this uncertainty is therefore not only a technical exercise. It also helps protect the carbon case for using mass timber in the first place.
Early messages from the project
The project is in its early stages, but a few themes are already coming through.
Insurers do not like surprises. They prioritise clarity on cost, time, disruption, and liability. Our project is being shaped to deliver that, while removing ambiguity before it becomes a dispute. Business interruption matters. The time a building is out of use can be as significant as the physical repair cost. Investigation timescales and repair sequencing both need to account for occupancy impacts.
Like-for-like is not always simple. Repair assumptions, particularly around product availability and structural compatibility, need to be established earlier in the process.
Design for simple repair. Buildings designed with repair in mind tend to be easier to investigate, suggesting that upstream design decisions can meaningfully reduce post-loss complexity.
A related project on moisture
Alongside this work, ASBP has also recently started a related project on managing moisture in timber buildings, which runs from May to October 2026. Moisture, whether from construction-stage water ingress or in-use exposure, remains one of the most common causes of issues in mass timber. The new project will develop guidance on prevention, detection, and control of water ingress, aimed at designers, insurers, investors, and the wider sector. It is designed to be internationally relevant, with applicability across the UK, US, and Europe. Together, the two projects address two of the most pressing technical questions facing the mass timber industry: how to prevent damage where possible, and how to assess and repair it confidently when it does occur.
Get Involved
If you have practical experience of damage investigation or repair on a mass timber building, please get in touch with project manager, Dr. Asselia Katenbayeva at: [email protected]. For the moisture management project, please contact Richard Broad, Director, ASBP at: [email protected].
Read the full article in the latest Structural Timber magazine here
