Did you know that it would take planting 17 hectares of eucalyptus or up to 43 hectares of mahogany to match the CO2 capture of JUST ONE hectare of bamboo?
To fully understand this topic, it is necessary to have a clear understanding of the following concepts.
Plants, through photosynthesis, capture CO2 from the air and fix carbon in their tissues, and this process is directly proportional to the age of the plant. To grow, the younger a plant is, the more CO2 it needs to capture from the atmosphere and therefore fix more carbon. An older plant captures very little CO2 and hardly fixes any carbon.
Based on the above concepts, tropical rainforests and old-growth forests are capturing very little CO2, but they are carbon sinks because they have fixed this element in their structure for many years. When these forests are cut down or burned, the fixed carbon returns to the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.
It is afforestation and reforestation that truly contribute and will continue to contribute to capturing large amounts of CO2, fixing carbon in all the plant’s components. This equation helps to decarbonize the planet.
Bamboos are fast-growing plants that produce large amounts of biomass in short periods of time, and in this process, they capture considerable amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, fixing large amounts of carbon in their structures and becoming carbon sinks in very little time.
While a forest with slow-growing plants takes 80 years or more to mature, and a forest with fast-growing plants takes 10 years, a bamboo forest can be established in just three years.
Bamboo Business, under the direction of Hormilson Cruz, conducted the most thorough study ever done on biomass production and CO2 capture in giant bamboo over a period of 10 years. The research was conducted in the field by extracting bamboo stalks from the soil year after year for 7 years and analyzing the biomass of each organ for each year of growth. Subsequently, the amount of fixed carbon was calculated for each organ, then for each plant, each bamboo stalk, and finally per hectare. No linear regression equations were used in this process because the research was entirely field and laboratory-based.
This research showed that, on average, one hectare of giant bamboo can fix 21.5 tons of carbon per year, which allows us to conclude that, for this fixation, each hectare captures 78.5 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually.
Therefore, the establishment of bamboo forests is shown as the fastest and most viable forestry alternative to help mitigate global warming.
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