Bamboo the new way to construct sustainably
Transcriber: Aya Ashraf
Reviewer: David DeRuwe
On November 2020, hurricanes Eta and Iota
devastated the Central American coast
in Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
Hundreds were killed
and thousands displaced.
Billions of dollars of losses,
as the entire Atlantic coast
suffered severe flooding,
often catastrophically
for low-income communities.
The non-stop and devastating
winds and rains of Eta and Iota
destroyed bridges, damaged
over 1,400 roads in the region,
submerged the Honduran airport,
and made lagoons out of entire
cities in all countries.
Climate change is already hurting
and is bound to increase the frequency
and severity of these storms.
As you can see from this map,
the entire Central American Atlantic coast
is severely vulnerable to storms,
hurricanes, and sea level rise.
The communities that live
along this coast, mostly low income,
must adapt to survive.
Luckily, there is a powerful
carbon-capture technology
that can help mitigate
the causes and consequences
of these climate catastrophes,
while helping local communities adapt
to a warmer world and its consequences.
That technology is bamboo.
Bamboo is one of the most versatile
and useful plants on Earth.
With over 1,300 species,
there are tens of thousands of known uses.
Some of its varieties are known
as the fastest-growing plants on Earth.
And believe me, it’s true.
It can grow on and help
restore degraded lands,
like those in flooded or saturated areas.
It has a normal social, environmental,
and economic potential
as the fastest-growing timber-like plant.
When sequestered in long-term
products like buildings,
bamboo becomes a formidable CO2 sink.
At Cassa, we use bamboo to build
sustainable and beautiful constructions
from homes to schools
to businesses, temples,
and even shopping malls.
In the eight years since our founding,
as a construction company,
we have grown in love
with this phenomenal building material.
It is durable, resistant, flexible,
lightweight, versatile, and beautiful.
Its nature compels you
to be creative with design
and create beautiful structures that
harmonize with bamboo’s organic nature.
We aim to powerfully impact the SDGs,
and we know housing
to be one of humanity’s
largest environmental footprints,
and in Central America,
it is a particularly severe deficit.
At Cassa, we closely monitor
the environmental footprint
of each of our homes.
With over 80 projects built,
we’ve provided over 11 million gallons
of clean water capacity,
600,000 kilowatt hours of clean energy,
and over 2,000 tons of CO2
captured and avoided
through the construction alone.
For that reason, we have become
enamored with bamboo,
a building material
that you can grow yourself,
and that captures tons of carbon
throughout its production.
While we have been successful
in building high-quality,
sustainable homes for all income sectors,
we believe that bamboo can also benefit
those at the lowest levels of income,
and that also live
in climate-vulnerable situations.
This idea would spark collaboration
between Cassa, Dalberg,
and other great partners in
the Climate Smart Forest Economy Program.
Forests can provide up to 40%
of the matrix of climate change solutions.
It’s not just about reforesting,
but creating community economics
that keep the forests productive,
both socially and environmentally.
Cassa was selected
as one of the breakthrough initiatives
with our project of designing
a do-it-yourself bamboo house
for climate refugees and providing them
with bamboo plantations.
We aim for a massive dissemination
of non-invasive bamboo plantations
accompanied with knowledge transfers
to the communities
who will benefit from them.
This will have a profound effect
on beneficiaries’ resilience
and climate change adaptation.
Bamboo homes can be highly durable,
beautiful, and affordable,
not to mention they are built
with a natural building material
that is very quick to grow,
constantly regenerating,
and truly renewable.
Through high quality and easy to
understand manuals, videos and tutorials,
we will give people the means
to grow and build their own home
with little and simple skills or tools.
Most wait for months
or years in the shelter,
hoping and waiting
for donated construction materials,
only to have the house
flood again in a few years.
It is a vicious cycle of misery.
Bamboo could decimate this problem,
offering people a fast-growth perennial
and high-quality building material.
Bamboo is an ideal and powerful
economic and environmental tool.
As the new culms grow very rapidly
in the first couple years of their life,
they capture lots of carbon.
Now, sustainable harvesting of bamboo
involves cutting only the mature culms,
an act that propels the mother
plant to grow new children.
So basically, the act of harvesting
the economically valuable material
is what compels the mother plant
to stay healthy and keep
producing new children,
capturing ever thus more carbon
from the atmosphere,
and continuing to benefit the community
in a renewable and sustainable way.
This is really amazing.
Compare this to a single pine tree
that can take 25 to 30 years to grow,
and once you harvest it, it dies.
In this case, as we use
the plant sustainably,
it motivates it to keep producing.
It reaches maturity
in five to seven years,
and every year keeps producing
mature culms for many decades.
Bamboo is really an economic
and environmental powerhouse.
Now, imagine if we apply
this wonderful technology
all along this coastline.
In the highlighted region of the map,
there are 13 million hectares
and three million inhabitants,
mostly poor.
It is also very sparsely populated.
If only 3% of land were given to bamboo,
there would be an additional
309,000 hectares of bamboo,
which would capture
30 million tons of CO2 per year.
That amount is huge
and equivalent to taking
6.5 million cars off the road,
building 6,200 wind turbines,
or burning 33 billion pounds of coal.
The impact of this would be enormous,
not just on the local communities
but also on the continent
and for the world.
If you want to help build
massive resilience in Central America
and help capture tons of carbon,
get in touch with us,
and let’s grow lots more bamboo.