Biochar for climate change mitigation: fact or fiction?

Feb 2009

Soils are extremely diverse and dynamic, playing a fundamental role in supporting communities of plants, detritivores (which break down organic matter) and microbial communities, interacting with the atmosphere, regulating water cycles and much more. As we face the catastrophic impacts of climate change, efforts to “engineer” the climate are proliferating. Among these is a proposal to use soils as a medium for addressing climate change by scaling up the use of biochar.
Unfortunately, like other such schemes to engineer biological systems, it is based on a dangerously reductionist view of the natural world, which fails to recognize and accommodate ecological complexity and variation.
Research on biochar is clearly indicating that there simply is no “one-size-fits-all” biochar solution, that many critically important issues remain poorly understood, and that there are likely to be serious and unpredictable negative impacts if this technology is adopted on a large scale. Yet proponents still do not hesitate to make unsubstantiated claims and to lobby for very significant supports to scale up their technology.
Thus far there has been little public awareness or debate over the large-scale application of biochar. The speed with which lobbying efforts are moving forward at national and international levels is alarmingly similar to the situation observed with agrofuels several years ago; poorly considered, based on unsubstantiated claims and accompanied by an effective “greenwash”, the industry grew very rapidly and secured policy and financial support measures which even the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has proclaimed a mistake. It is imperative that we do not repeat the errors by embracing yet another technology that is poorly understood, inherently risky and will likely encourage further land conversion and expansion of industrial monocultures.

By: A. Ernsting, R. Smolker

 
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