## 2 Materials and Methods  
A systematic review was conducted to synthesize existing knowledge comprehensively and without bias [21]. The method was based on the \"Five-Step Systematic Review\" [22] (Table 1). This five-step systematic review process offers a structured and comprehensive methodology, ensuring clarity of research questions, thoroughness in identifying relevant work, rigorous quality assessment of studies, careful synthesis of evidence, and thoughtful interpretation of findings [22]. Step 1 was to unambiguously state the research question: what are the contributions of bamboo and bamboo products to climate change mitigation? In step 2, we identified 914 peer-reviewed research articles from 4 core databases: Web of Science (216), Scopus (288), EBSCO (166), and CAB Direct (244) following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) framework. The search criteria used were consistent across the four databases. We searched for 'bamboo' in the title, and in the meantime, a series of abstract requirements were searched intersectant (using the Boolean operator 'AND') using a number of keywords, including bamboo forest, carbon sink, and carbon market (Figure 1). The year 1997 was set as the beginning of the timespan to reflect the time that the concept of carbon credits emerged through the Kyoto Protocol [23]. The search spanned until 25 January 2022. The Covidence platform was used to effectively assess the study quality in step 3, which is a professional platform explicitly designed for systematic reviews, enabling team members to collaborate seamlessly and synchronously [24]. The Covidence platform automatically removed 501 duplicates, resulting in 413 studies left for further screening. After first examining the titles and abstracts, 291 articles were excluded for falling outside our research scope. For instance, some studies focused on the soil contaminant uptake quantification of bamboo forests. Others emphasized the constructional strength of bamboo materials, and others researched the invasiveness of bamboo species. The remaining 122 studies were imported into the software NVivo for immersive reading [25]. After carefully reviewing the full text of the remaining 122 studies in NVivo, 31 articles were excluded. These papers were either unrelated to our research scope or technically challenging to interpret. For example, some were review papers focusing on different scopes; some studies were not in the scientific article structure, including magazines, prefaces, and perspective articles, and several papers were not publicly accessible online and remained unreachable after help from the University of British Columbia library staff. The complete PRISMA diagram shows the study quality assessment process (Figure 2). \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**Step** & **Description of Each Step** \\ \hline I & Framing the Question \\ II & Identifying Relevant Publications \\ III & Assessing Study Quality \\ IV & Summarizing the Evidence \\ V & Interpreting the Findings \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: The five-step systematic review structure [22]. Figure 1: The Boolean structure in the Scopus Database (25 January 2022). We reviewed the remaining 91 studies in NVivo during step 4, summarizing the evidence based on a thematic analysis following the guidelines of [PERSON] et al. [26] (Figure 3). With the synthesis and analysis of the larger subject under many themes, this method enabled the generation of themes and the identification of patterns across the bulk of the research papers [27]. Our team thoroughly read most of the research papers and created a rough coding framework. Three broader themes emerged from this analysis, namely, carbon sinks in bamboo forest ecosystems, carbon storage in bamboo products, and carbon credits in bamboo projects. Additionally, several subthemes were defined under the three larger themes (Figure 4).