Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu on Friday said the Philippines must embrace bamboo as a substitute for wood timber if it wants to increase the nation’s forest cover and fight climate change.
To use bamboo as an alternative to traditional hardwood building materials would eliminate the need to cut trees in the forest, thus helping lessen climate change impacts, he said.
“We are envisioning to produce engineered bamboo as a substitute for actual lumber instead of cutting trees that are there in the forest so that we will increase our forest cover in the next several years or decades to catch up with our ASEAN neighbors,” he said.
Only 23 percent of the country’s total land area is covered by forest, which makes the Philippines having one of the lowest forest covers in Southeast Asia.
The average forest cover in other countries in the region is between 30 and 35 percent.
“We are not competing that we should be the highest—that we should be there at the top of the forest cover, but it is a necessity for us because we used to have the biggest forest cover in the ASEAN, in Southeast Asia. But not now because of our overuse of our timber,” Cimatu said.
He said that bamboo—technically a grass, not a tree—is not only a sustainable alternative to wood but also has the potential to significantly offset carbon emissions.
He said the Department of Environment and Natural Resources was eyeing Panay Island in Western Visayas to be the center of bamboo production in the country.