="center">Figure 2 Bambusa Vulgaris, a clumping bamboo variety
A Bambusa Balcooa clump (not Beema) at Rivers End Nursery, Bayview, TX, 2008
(Image by Rivers End Nursery, Bayview, TX) Details DMCA
Figure 3 A Bambusa Balcooa clump (not Beema) at Rivers End Nursery, Bayview, TX, 2008 (Notice two new sprouts on the right edge of the clump.)
Figure 4 Giant Bamboo Shoot
Some varieties propagate by flowering and producing seeds. These varieties live from 40 to 80 years before flowering and then dying. A high density, non-flowering, sterile, clumping variety of Bambusa Balcooa, called "Beema", (Click here) has been developed in India through tissue culture methods. The clump has solid core culms and grows 8 to 10 new shoots per year. Mature culms (three or more years old) are harvested each year and sold to make more than 20 commercial products. In a plantation each Beema clump is said to capture about 400 kg of CO2 per year.
The world average annual per capita CO2 emission rate was 5000 kg in 2014. So 12.5 Beema clumps would have made one average person carbon neutral in 2014. Our CO2 emission rate in the US for 2014 was about 16,490 kg per person, more than 3 times the world average.
These are daunting statistics. According to DRAWDOWN, it will be necessary to solve socio-political-economic international problems before sufficient cooperation to obtain the CO2 reduction available with carbon sequestration methods will be possible. This article limits discussion to the possible benefit of the unimpeded use of bamboo.
Consider plantations of bamboo. Such plantations would be located in tropical environments. They do not require prime agricultural land. They can be grown on deforested Amazon rainforest land or any other available land. Allowing access lanes for cultivation and harvesting, and, allotting each clump a 15 ft. diameter circle, a density of 124 clumps per acre is possible. Such plantations would be operated and maintained by locally employed labor whose families live on the property and have access to a school, stores, gardening areas, and medical care. Ecoplanet (click here) has pioneered this type of operation. Each acre would produce about 991.4 culms annually, sequestering a total of 49570 kg (54.8 US tons) of CO2 each year, thus neutralizing the yearly carbon footprint of 10 world average humans.
What about biodiversity? Beema bamboo improves the potential value of Bambusa Balcooa in plantations without genetic modification. The plants have been cultured to be sterile so that clumps do not flower and die, and the core has been made solid so that the clumps in plantations never have to be replaced, and the culms have maximum biomass. There is no danger of loss of biodiversity due to invasiveness.
Tissue culture is not a complicating factor. Dr. Bharathi Nambi, the agricultural scientist who developed Beema, produces and sells 10 million tissue cultured plantlets each year. This can be done in each country where bamboo plantations are located. For example, in the Amazon basin the rainforest has been under siege by clearcutting and converting the land to cattle ranches. In the last 10 years a yearly average of 1,825,567 acres were deforested. A bamboo plantation that size would neutralize the annual CO2 emissions of 18,255,670 world average humans.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
3
