Could Biochar Save the World?

Biochar—the agricultural application of charcoal produced from burning biomass—may be one of this century's most important social and environmental revolutions. This seemingly humble practice—a technology that goes back thousands of years—has the potential to help mitigate a number of entrenched global problems: desperate hunger, lack of soil fertility in the tropics, rainforest destruction due to slash-and-burn agriculture, and even climate change. 


Photo Credit: Karunakar Rayker

"Biochar is a recalcitrant form of carbon that will stay almost entirely unaltered in soils for very long periods of time. So you can sequester carbon in a simple, durable and safe way by putting the char in the soil. Other types of carbon in soils rapidly turn into carbon dioxide. Char doesn't," managing director of the Biochar Fund, Laurens Rademakers, told mongabay.com in a recent interview. 

The Biochar Fund, which is currently implementing programs in Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, focuses first on alleviating hunger and providing food security, viewing carbon sequestration and forest protection as a bonus. But how does biochar aid the world's hungry? 

"Biochar will increase the fertility of problem-soils in a very noticeable, quick and long-term way. This is important for subsistence farmers, because they often cannot afford to buy fertilizers or invest in organic cultivation techniques that take a long time to establish. Biochar can be produced locally, with very low investment, and in a simple, easily understood process," Rademakers explains. 

According the UN, one billion people in the world today suffer from hunger: the highest number in history. With global population still on the rise, researchers around the world are attempting to figure out how to feed the world without decimating the environment and worsening climate change. 

"With biochar, [farmers] can jump from being undernourished to well-fed, and from subsistence farmer to a peasant that can sell some surplus—after only one or two harvests," Rademakers says. 

With farmers able to produce more on tropical soils there is far less impetus to conduct slash-and-burn agriculture, which means that once tropical soils are depleted impoverished farmers simply move deeper into the forest and clear a new plot. According to Rademakers, this inefficient cycle—difficult for the farmers and destructive to the environment—could be stalled, perhaps even halted, by the application of biochar. With some half billion people currently practicing slash-and-burn farming in the tropics, biochar, if employed intelligently, could go a long way in mitigating deforestation. A recent study in Nature found that sustainable application of biochar could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent.

If this sounds too-good-to-be-true, Rademakers says that test areas in sub-Saharan Africa are showing amazing results. 

In Cameroon, the Biochar Fund saw crop yields jump on average by 240 percent. After this success, the organization began working with "the world's poorest people, cut off from much of the world, 70% undernourished" in the Democratic Republic of Congo, says Rademakers. 

With the aid of a local organization, ADAPEL, the Biochar Fund is working this year to provide biochar to twenty farming villages in the Congo. 

Rademakers says this project's goals are many: "slow down the local deforestation rate by at least 50%, boost crop yields by 100%, thus improve farm incomes and alleviate some poverty and hunger, and reduce fire-wood consumption by households by 50%, which we are doing by introducing char-producing cooking stoves that burn very cleanly and efficiently." 

Despite the incredible results produced by biochar in recent studies, Rademakers cautions that more work is needed before widespread implementation: "It is a young concept. We must give it some time, and test it more thoroughly." 

However, he says that if trials continue to perform well "in the [world's] most difficult places" the organization is "ready to work in all places where deforestation is a problem caused by poor people who have no alternative." 

If biochar continues to show its effectiveness in feeding some of the world's hungriest people, halting deforestation, and sequestering carbon, it could prove one of the world's best weapons against the seemingly overwhelming problems of the 21st Century. 

"The tropical forest frontier has become a mental frontier in the West," says Rademakers. "It is here that the fight against climate change can be won in a relatively straightforward manner, simply by protecting forests. However, biochar seems to be one of the few strategies with which one doesn't chase people off their lands or into alternative, problematic livelihoods in the name of conservation." 

In an August 2010 interview with mongabay.com, Laurens Rademakers talks about the direct and indirect benefits of implementing biochar in tropical agricultural communities, while outlining both the complexities of these initiatives and the questions that still remain unanswered. 

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