Giving Compass' Take:

• Ramboll is an engineering, design, and consulting company that partners with a local Indonesian nonprofit to help build bamboo houses that can stand during earthquakes.  

• In what ways can donors help strengthen these partnerships for creative climate action?  

• Learn about Indonesia's recent rainfall and flooding. 

In 2018, a series of earthquakes struck the Indonesian island of Lombok, killing 560 people. The area was reduced to rubble and hundreds of thousands were displaced. Near the epicenter, most buildings were destroyed, in part because of poor concrete construction. A new project in the area aims to help villages rebuild with earthquake-resistant houses made of local bamboo.

“Bamboo is a lightweight material, and it’s very strong,” says Marcin Dawydzik, a structural engineer at the London office of Ramboll, the engineering, design, and consulting company that designed a template for the house. The light weight means that when an earthquake hits, there’s less mass to creates stresses on the structure. The material is also flexible. “As the earthquake happens, the house will move a little bit and wobble and shake,” he says. “But that actually means that the energy is being dissipated, and all that movement makes it survive very strong earthquakes.”

When the earthquakes hit Lombok, Dawydzik happened to have a friend living in the area working with a local nonprofit. He reached out to check on her and learned that her house—made from bamboo—had survived, while neighboring concrete houses had been obliterated or were no longer liveable. “I thought, I’m an engineer, working for an engineering company,” he says. “I have the skills. How can we help?” He ended up traveling to Indonesia a few months later to see the destruction and to begin to work on a bamboo design that could be validated as structurally sound and used more broadly.

Late last year, the engineers partnered with a local nonprofit, Grenzeloos Milieu, to build three template houses in three villages, working with both skilled and unskilled community members on the construction, educating them about how the structure was designed to resist earthquakes.

Read the full article about bamboo houses by Adele Peters at Fast Company.