http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0816-hance_rademakers.html
Could biochar save the world?
Jeremy Hance
mongabay.com
August 16, 2010
An interview with Laurens Rademakers of Biochar Fund.
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.
“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.
http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0816-hance_rademakers.html
via Frank Strie
