This year, to honor World Bamboo Day, the WBO is launching a new hashtag: #PlantBamboo.
Since 2009, we have been celebrating World Bamboo Day to increase the awareness of bamboo globally. Where bamboo grows naturally, bamboo has been a daily element, but its utilization has not always been sustainable due to exploitation. The World Bamboo Organization aims to bring the potential of bamboo to a more elevated exposure – to protect natural resources and the environment, to ensure sustainable utilization, to promote new cultivation of bamboo for new industries in regions around the world, as well as promote traditional uses locally for community economic development.
You can see the global celebrations for World Bamboo Day posted on our Facebook Group Page.
The world is beginning to understand our call. Technologies and innovations are bringing more bamboo utilization to a more contemporary audience. Engineered bamboo products are in more extensive markets, gaining more acceptance, and changing the way our built environment gets built. However, if we are to use more bamboo, utilize it beyond traditional experiences, we need to PLANT BAMBOO. Therefore, we now say to the world, IT IS TIME TO PLANT BAMBOO.
A MESSAGE FROM THE WORLD BAMBOO AMBASSADORS
#PlantBamboo
It is estimated that there are more than two billion hectares - that is nearly 5 billion acres - of deforested and degraded land around the world waiting for human intervention to save it, to nourish it, and breathe new life into it. The health of our planet needs us to do something big - as soon as possible.
In many cases, the natural biome in these regions will never return due to toxic pollution that has led to collapsed ecosystems and the extinction of local flora and fauna. However dismal, these lands can recover and regain ecological functionality - admittedly with collaborative inputs from stakeholders, integrated goal-setting, and sustainable management practices.
When considering the optimization of forest ecosystem goods and services as societal needs change- and new challenges arise - bamboo has a tremendous role to play. We’ve heard about planting trees - yes - but it is also time to plant bamboo.
Bamboo is resilient & adaptable - with immense biodiversity. Bamboo species can restore land. Their unique characteristics of quick growth, extensive root systems, and pioneer spirit can reduce erosion, stabilize slopes, absorb heavy metals, create shade, harbor wildlife, recycle carbon dioxide, and clean the air. Planting and managing sustainable bamboo forests allows for multiple social benefits, including rural development (improved housing), agroforestry products (which includes nutritional food and alternative fiber), with the big bonus of climate mitigation.
Bamboos are natural flora in temperate, tropical and subtropical parts of the globe, native on every continent except Europe and Antarctica, and the latest estimates are that there may be some 50 million hectares of bamboo around the world. That’s nearly 124 million acres.
Bamboo fits well into a landscape mosaic of interdependent land uses. Degraded lands around the globe, with diverse habitats, could be replanted with bamboo.
The United Nations has declared 2021 to 2030 as the ‘Decade on Ecosystem Restoration’ - a massive global ‘call to action’ to mobilize the political and financial support necessary to restore deforested and degraded ecosystems over the coming decade. As a member of the UN’s Global Compact, the World Bamboo Organization endorses this initiative, and sees real potential where bamboo can help with many of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
The World Bamboo Organization has also signed The Kew Declaration on Reforestation for Biodiversity, Carbon Capture and Livelihoods to protect and restore the world’s forests. This important manifesto outlines key requests to policymakers, reforestation financiers and practitioners, to enable better decision-making for global reforestation to safeguard forest biodiversity, mitigate climate change and improve livelihoods.
To the planet, we say #PlantBamboo
It is time to plant bamboo, and not simply use it.
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