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IBI Side Event at UNFCCC COP 16 Deliberations, December 2010, Cancun, Mexico
IBI held an official UNFCCC side event in Cancun, Mexico as part of the UNFCCC COP16 deliberations. The side event was moderated by Sergio Zelay-Bonilla of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and speakers included Debbie Reed, IBI Executive Director; Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University and IBI Board Chairman; and Thea Whitman, also of Cornell University. IBI’s side event was held Friday evening, December 3, 2010 in the Cancun Messe, on the eve of Agriculture and Rural Development Day (ARDD), an all-day event held on Saturday, December 4, 2010. The IBI Side event covered policy, scientific, and demonstration applications related to biochar, and addressed some contemporary issues related to biochar and reflected in the continued progress of agricultural sector mitigation and adaptation opportunities within the context of the UNFCCC, and also discussed at ARDD.
Reed’s policy-focused presentation began with a discussion about the relative variability inherent in biochar production and utilization systems, and the need to establish metrics and knowledge systems in order to provide assurances to regulatory and political processes that biochar systems can be effective climate mitigation and adaptation tools and be confident of their intended and actual impacts. In the case of biochar, certain aspects of biochar systems are more relevant to climate change mitigation activities (for instance, recalcitrance of the biochar material, leading to longevity in soils, and to long-term carbon pools), while many others are relevant to climate adaptation (lending resilience to soils, increasing water holding capacity, increasing soil aggregation, etc.). Advances in the science of biochar allow efforts to differentiate and describe individual functional aspects of biochar that are important for certain uses. Some are even creating ‘fit-for-purpose’ biochars’ to meet specific needs.
Within the current UNFCCC negotiations, Reed stated that credible, science-based standards increase the technical and political integrity of biochar systems, and can enable their utilization and acceptance as climate mitigation and adaptation tools. She then shared advances in standards related to biochar and biochar systems that are contributing to this integrity, including proposals for and the development of CDM-style biochar protocols, as well as ISO-style protocols, which are very promising. Additionally, Reed proposed a third approach for biochar, within the context of current UNFCCC negotiations relative to agriculture and forests: a landscape-based approach which considers and integrates all management practices on land, and their ecosystem impacts to that land. A landscape-based approach will more effectively deal with biological systems by allowing for integrated management systems rather than targeted, individual nutrient-specific, or GHG-specific activities or approaches. Such a landscape-based approach will necessarily include and describe both forestry and agricultural managed ecosystems and other land use impacts within any given landscape, allowing for net ecosystem and GHG impacts to be described. Currently, there exist biogeochemical models which, combined with statistically-based sampling, can provide robust measurement, reporting and verification approaches to allow such approaches to effectively contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation approaches, while incorporating biodiversity, conservation, social, and other necessary attributes. Such landscape-based approaches will also allow for the multiple ancillary benefits of biochar systems to be considered and acknowledged.
Johannes Lehmann provided scientific updates related to the climate mitigation attributes of biochar, with a specific emphasis on the recalcitrance and longevity of high-quality biochar. He also described how particular functional attributes of biochar – such as the stability of the biochar carbon and our ability to test this recalcitrance and predict it within soil systems, as well as to identify specific chemical signals of biochar carbon in soil, to show it remains over time – make it effective as a climate mitigation tool.
Thea Whitman provided evidence of the significant potential of biochar cookstoves in mitigating climate change and in having additional beneficial aspects within the ecosystems the cookstoves are deployed in. Based on her work in a rural Kenyan village testing biochar cookstoves, improved non-biochar cookstoves, and traditional 3-stone cookstoves, Whitman showed how life cycle analyses (LCA) tools could be used to describe the net impacts of each cookstove system, and the significant GHG and biomass utilization impacts of the biochar cookstoves compared to the traditional and the improved cookstove systems. Whitman also showed data on beneficial social and other impacts of the biochar cookstoves in the homes and villages where they were utilized.
Presentations from the Event
