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.