A Fijian bamboo company is pushing the country to start approving bamboo buildings, saying they could stand up to winds of 331 kilometres an hour — above the 252km/h it says Fiji’s building code requires. The claim comes from Arno Roos, founder and chief executive of Pacific Ark, after the Ministry of Fisheries and Forestry received six bamboo research reports in Suva on Friday to mark World Bamboo Day, according to Wood Central, an Australian wood industry publication.
Roos gave the figures in an interview with Fijivillage, the Fijian news outlet, which Wood Central cited. No test has been carried out in Fiji to back the number, and Roos’s own ten-year plan does not schedule local cyclone testing until 2028.
Key facts
- Roos put bamboo’s wind resistance at 92 metres per second — about 331km/h — against a building code requirement he gave as 70 metres per second, or about 252km/h. He gave both figures to Fijivillage on Monday, Wood Central reported.
- Neither figure has been independently verified here: the 331km/h claim is untested in Fiji, and the 252km/h code threshold is attributed to Roos rather than to a published code document in Wood Central’s account.
- Six reports were handed to the forestry ministry in Suva on Friday, produced under a two-year project run by the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), an intergovernmental body, with the Fijian government.
- Roos was lead consultant on one of them, a November 2025 study tracing bamboo in Fiji from the ground to the building site.
- That study found Fiji had “no national bamboo standards or guidelines” covering anything from planting to building.
- GGGI put the cost of a bamboo building in Fiji at FJ$1,300 a square metre.
- A ten-year plan, run by the forestry ministry from 2026, targets 25 certified bamboo buildings in Fiji by 2035, plus 15 regional nurseries and 10,000 hectares restored.
Why it matters
Fiji’s building code sets a wind threshold that any new housing type has to clear, and Pacific Ark is arguing bamboo clears it with room to spare. If the claim holds up, it would put a locally grown material into a conversation about cyclone-resistant housing that has so far leaned on imported products and donor finance — the same territory covered by the ADB’s recent $210 million package for Fiji, which paired a large reform loan with a far smaller disaster fund.
But nothing in the reports makes bamboo buildable tomorrow. The authors’ own finding — that Fiji has no national bamboo standards at all — is the obstacle the six reports are meant to start clearing.
Who is making the claim, and what is still unproven
The 331km/h figure did not come from a regulator, a university or an independent engineer. It came from the chief executive of a company that sells bamboo construction and that would be a direct commercial beneficiary if Fiji began certifying bamboo buildings. Roos is also inside the research programme itself, as lead consultant on one of the six reports the ministry received. Wood Central’s account of the handover carries no independent engineering assessment of the wind number, and no statement from Fiji’s Construction Industry Council, public works ministry or a consulting structural engineer testing it.
That does not make the figure wrong. Engineered bamboo is a real structural material with published strength data elsewhere in the tropics, and the Navala accounts below suggest traditional bamboo houses have already outperformed tin in a Category 5 storm. But there is a gap between a strength claim made in a radio-style interview and a number an engineer can sign off, an insurer can price and a building inspector can enforce — and that gap is exactly what the ten-year plan sets out to close. Roos’s own timetable puts cyclone testing in Fiji in a second phase from 2028 to 2030, alongside a proposed Bamboo Testing and Innovation Centre. On the company’s own schedule, the claim will not be locally tested for at least two years.
The comparison figure deserves the same caution. The 252km/h code requirement is reported as Roos’s characterisation of the code, not as a quotation from Fiji’s National Building Code, and Wood Central’s piece does not cite the code clause. Readers wanting the authoritative threshold would need it from the Fijian government or the ministry responsible for building control.
What the six reports cover
The reports range from an assessment of how strong Fiji’s common Bambusa vulgaris is to a cement-and-bamboo framing method studied during a trip to the Philippines, according to Wood Central. Roos told the outlet he did not want to import someone else’s industry.
Saki Tuisolia, GGGI’s Pacific regional director, said growing bamboo had never been Fiji’s problem, and that the harder task was winning over engineers and the wider public — which is, in effect, an admission from inside the project that the engineering case is not yet settled.
The six reports themselves have not been published as a public set at the time of writing; Wood Central’s account remains the fullest available description of what they contain, and the ministry and GGGI are the holders of the originals.
The numbers behind a bamboo build
The FJ$1,300 a square metre figure is, according to GGGI, a first local yardstick for comparing bamboo with conventional construction. Wood Central’s report does not give the conventional-build figure it should be measured against, so the number is a baseline rather than a saving.
In its own harvesting trials, Pacific Ark says it paid landowners $2 in goodwill per nine-metre pole, with harvest crews averaging $45 per worker per day, Wood Central reported. Those are the only cost and wage figures on the record from the project so far.
What it would mean for Fiji’s economy
Strip out the cyclone framing and the pitch is an industrial policy one: replace an imported structural material with one that grows in Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, and keep the spending onshore. Every imported roofing sheet, steel section or length of framing timber used in a Fijian house is money leaving the country; a certified bamboo supply chain would move part of that spend to landowners, nursery workers, harvesters, treatment yards and builders inside Fiji. That is the import-substitution argument, and it is the strongest economic case the project has — though no one involved has yet published a figure for how much of the construction import bill bamboo could realistically displace.
The job creation implied by the plan is spread across three layers. At the land end, 15 regional nurseries and 10,000 hectares of bamboo grown among farm crops would put paid work into rural districts, at the $45-a-day rate Pacific Ark recorded in its trials, plus the $2-per-pole goodwill payments to landowners — modest sums individually, but a new income line for landowning units with no current use for wild bamboo stands. In the middle sit the processing and treatment steps a certifiable product needs, which barely exist in Fiji today. At the building end, 25 certified buildings by 2035 is a small pipeline in construction terms, but it is the volume required to prove the material to the people who decide whether a twenty-sixth gets built.
The economic constraint is the same as the technical one: without a standard, there is no market. The authors found insurers and lenders unlikely to finance or cover a bamboo building that cannot be certified to anything, and the Construction Industry Council’s one-project-at-a-time position means every developer carries the full approval cost alone. Until a standard exists, the industry cannot scale past demonstration projects — which is why the drafting work at the ministries matters more, commercially, than the wind figure.
A plan that runs to 2035
Beyond the 25 certified buildings, Roos’s team wants 15 regional nurseries and 10,000 hectares of land restored with bamboo grown among farm crops by 2035. The forestry ministry is to run the plan from this year.
Simione Tauvoli, acting permanent secretary of the Ministry of Fisheries and Forestry, said as his ministry received the reports: “It is evidence this Ministry can stand on.” Tauvoli said the ministry’s next job was to turn the draft guidelines into rules it can enforce and to invest in bamboo nurseries. Fiji now has draft guidelines for managing and harvesting bamboo, while its building guidelines are still being finished with the public works ministry, the Philippines’ Base Bahay Foundation and Erasito Consultants.
On the regulatory side, Wood Central reported that the Ministry of Trade was reviewing last November how international ISO bamboo standards could be written into Fiji’s building codes, backed by the forestry, public works and housing ministries. Adopting an ISO standard would give the material something to be certified against without Fiji having to write a code from scratch — and would give a wind-load claim somewhere to be formally tested.
What Navala’s bure showed after Winston
In Navala village, the study’s authors recorded local accounts that more than half of the traditional bamboo bure houses survived Cyclone Winston, the Category 5 storm of 2016, while many tin houses were destroyed, according to Wood Central. It is the kind of on-the-ground evidence that carries weight in a country preparing to host the pre-COP31 talks, though the authors were clear it is not a substitute for a certifiable standard. Residents’ recollections of which houses stood are also not the same thing as instrumented wind-load data, and Winston’s recorded gusts at Navala are not given in the account.
Australia is on a similar clock
The Bamboo Society of Australia launched its own ten-year roadmap on the same World Bamboo Day, aiming for domestic plantations to supply the equivalent of 16,600 homes’ worth of engineered bamboo each year by 2035, Wood Central reported. Australia has yet to plant the 20,000 hectares behind that target, and engineered bamboo has no deemed-to-satisfy pathway in its National Construction Code either. The regulatory bottleneck, in other words, is not a Fijian peculiarity.
Roos says Pacific Ark, which already works with the forestry ministry on research, is ready to start building with the government, and that several ministries could get behind the industry.
A note on sourcing
This report is based on Wood Central’s account of Friday’s handover in Suva and of Roos’s Monday interview, which was given to Fijivillage. We have not seen the interview recording, the text of the six GGGI reports, or the code clause behind the 252km/h figure, and no independent engineer’s view of the 331km/h claim has been published that we could locate. Where a figure rests on a single interested source, we have said so in the text rather than presenting it as established fact.
Frequently Asked Questions
Has the 331km/h wind claim been tested?
Not in Fiji. The figure comes from Pacific Ark founder and chief executive Arno Roos in an interview with Fijivillage, as reported by Wood Central, and Wood Central’s account carries no independent engineering assessment of it. Roos’s own ten-year plan puts local cyclone testing in a second phase running from 2028 to 2030, when a Bamboo Testing and Innovation Centre would open. Until then the number is a claim by a company that would benefit commercially if bamboo buildings were approved.
Who paid for the bamboo research handed to the forestry ministry?
New Zealand and Ireland funded the two-year project behind the six reports, according to Wood Central. The work was run by the Global Green Growth Institute, an intergovernmental body, together with the Fijian government. Roos was lead consultant on one of the six reports, which is a point readers should weigh when reading his wind figures: he is both an author inside the research programme and the head of a bamboo construction company.
Can a developer get a bamboo building approved in Fiji right now?
Only case by case, and with difficulty. Fiji’s Construction Industry Council told the report authors in June 2025 that a bamboo building must demonstrate its performance to win approval, one project at a time, Wood Central reported. The authors also found insurers and lenders were unlikely to take on a bamboo building without a formal standard it could be certified to. Fiji’s building guidelines for bamboo are still being drafted.
Does Fiji already grow the bamboo species used for construction?
The study’s authors found bamboo growing wild and most abundant in the wetter parts of Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, Wood Central reported. But they found Fiji short of species prized for building, such as Dendrocalamus asper, with no established nurseries or plantations growing bamboo for construction. That gap is why the ten-year plan calls for 15 regional nurseries.
What would a bamboo industry be worth to Fiji’s economy?
Neither the reports as described by Wood Central nor Pacific Ark has put a national figure on it. What is on the record is small and local: GGGI costed a bamboo building at FJ$1,300 a square metre, and Pacific Ark says its harvesting trials paid landowners $2 in goodwill per nine-metre pole with harvest crews averaging $45 per worker per day. The wider economic case being made is import substitution — growing a structural material in Fiji rather than shipping it in — plus rural harvesting income, nursery work and the construction jobs attached to 25 certified buildings by 2035.
