The Asian Development Bank (ADB) and bamboo planters urged more Filipinos to use the woody grass for housing to reduce the construction industry’s carbon footprint by at least 30 percent and enable access to alternative personal and business loans for Indigenous people.

These were conveyed during the Singapore Fintech Festival’s Insights Forum co-organized and co-ran by the ADB last 4 November.

Rhizome Philippines director for community bamboo development and carbon removal Eileen Gamo recommended building structures using 20 percent bamboo to achieve a double-digit reduction in carbon emissions from the construction sector.

Strong as steel

“It’s as strong as steel. It has the toughness of concrete allowing us to turn it into structural built materials like this beam,” she said.

“Bamboo’s fast growth rate means it can capture and store significant amounts of carbon dioxide,” ADB Advisor for Finance Sector Lotte Schou Zibell said.

The Philippines is the world’s sixth largest bamboo producer, with an average volume of 36 million poles per year.

“When grown over large areas, bamboo forests contribute to water conservation, watershed protection and landslide prevention,” Zibell said.

Apart from lowering carbon emissions to mitigate climate change, he added bamboo production and distribution has been eased through geotagging, an imaging technology that allows users to view areas with abundant bamboo and other information on the landowners’ bamboo farm.

“By combining data from geotagged and artificial intelligence, alternative credit scoring system can be developed for bamboo farmers, most of whom are unbanked and have no prior credit history,” Zibell said.

Preserving ancestral lands

Manobo tribe leader Timuey Alfredo Cacayan said the wider commercial use of bamboo will help preserve ancestral lands and contribute to national income.

Data from the Department of Science and Technology suggests over 53,000 hectares of available land for bamboo planting.

“The bamboo value chain involves a lot of partners and one of the key important partners is the indigenous peoples (IPs). One of the things that we’re doing is helping the IPs steward their land by sustainably growing bamboo that will lead to intergenerational wealth and intergenerational opportunities,” Cacayan said.

According to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ 2023 Sustainability Report, the country could see annual economic loss of some P645 billion until 2030 if climate change worsens.

The central bank shared that the country registered P24.4 billion in agricultural and infrastructure damage last year as the global temperature rose by 1.48 degrees Celsius, which is close to the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit set by many countries under the 2015 Paris Agreement, and weather conditions turned more severe.