Biochar and Sustainability

What are Components of Sustainable Biochar Systems?

IBI believes that sustainable biochar systems are essential to the future of biochar. These systems need to incorporate many aspects which may include: feedstocks and land use, personnel production safety, environmental production safety, transport, application, economics, soil and crop suitability, carbon sequestration ability, stability of carbon in soil, and energy use and output. Sharing experiences on what issues are obvious now and what emerge as systems are built can help future projects better encapsulate all aspects of sustainability. As resources become available, IBI will tackle the issue of sustainability and corresponding standards systematically. Of course, we recognize that this will be an ongoing and iterative process, as the wealth of scientific data and understanding of biochar systems and their functions, benefits and impacts continues to accumulate. 

Basic work that is already underway is highlighted below. 

Some Resources on Sustainability

Biochar Sustainability Protocols: Developed as a collaboration between the PNW Biochar and USBI, the protocols "set forth a shared vision and direction for the future of biochar technology among biochar proponents to prevent unintended consequences that could potentially arise from this process." The intent of the protocols is to provide a process for biochar stakeholders (those actually farming, producing, distributing and using biochar) to determine what methodologies they would need certify and adopt to ensure that they are in fact making and utilizing biochar in a socially, environmentally and economically sound manner. The protocols lay out principles, which set goals for all participants in the life-cycle of biochar. The principles are followed by baseline practices. The baseline practices are intended to set the threshold for where sustainability begins.

March 2011 Draft Protocols

Biochar Characterization Standards: Since 2009, IBI has focused on creating globally-developed and accepted standards for biochar characterization and the development of standards pertaining to biochar production and utilization. In June 2010, IBI received funding for this work and is now establishing a global, transparent process for setting biochar material standards. Our goal in this particular phase of the work is to produce a universally developed "final product" that any of our members can utilize as a basis for governmental and third-party certification agencies to develop biochar standards, apart from any use IBI makes of these products. For more information on this work, please see: http://www.biochar-international.org/characterizationstandard.

Guidelines for Developing and Testing a Pyrolysis Plant: IBI produced the 32 page document, Guidelines for the Development and Testing of Pyrolysis Plants to Produce Biochar, to assist in the development and testing of small pyrolysis plants. Because there are personal and environmental health and safety risks inherent in producing biochar, IBI has developed these Guidelines to assist in the safe and effective development and testing of biochar production technologies.

Highlighted presentations from recent biochar conferences that address sustainability issues:

• Annette Cowie of the Australian Nation Centre for Bioenergy Research: Ensuring sustainability of biochar: Learning from the experience of bioenergy; presented at IBI 2010, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 
• Jim Fournier, Biochar Engineering Corporation: Biochar’s role in global carbon management; presented at IBI 2010, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 
• Christoph Steiner, BIOCHAR.org: Biochar carbon sequestration in tropical land use systems? (co-author: Laurens Rademakers); presented at IBI 2010, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 
• Luca Montanarella, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability Land Management/SOIL action: Biochar – Sustainability, Certification, and Legislation (co-author: Verheijen, FGA); presented at IBI 2010, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 
• Saran Sohi, University of Edinburgh: Climate Change Mitigation Value and Potential (co-authors: S. Shackley, A. Cross, S. Ahmed and O. Masek) presented at IBI 2010, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 
• Annette Cowie, University of New England: Is biochar carbon negative? Quantifying the climate change mitigation benefits of biochar; presented at IBI 2010, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 
• Jim Amonette, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, WA; Maximum sustainable technical potential of biochar to mitigate climate change; presented at USBI, Ames, Iowa June 2010 
• Attilio Pigneri, Massey University New Zealand: Opportunities and challenges for biochar/bioenergy systems in the compliance and voluntary carbon markets; presented at Asia Pacific Biochar, May 2009, Gold Coast, Australia 
• Tracy Miedema, USDA National Organic Standards and Biochar International Policy Perspectives; presented at North American Biochar 2009, Boulder, CO, USA 
• Kelli Roberts, Life Cycle Assessment of Biochar Production From Corn Stover, Yard Waste, and Switchgrass; presented at North American Biochar 2009, Boulder, CO, USA

Other Resources

• A new report (draft in review) prepared by the Climate Trust for the California Energy Commission entitled Carbon Market Investment Criteria for Biochar Projects as an assessment of biochar to determine its appropriateness as a terrestrial carbon sequestration offset project. Click here for the full report.
• Social Carbon: Provides overall information on carbon offset projects.
• Forest Footprint Disclosure (FFD) engages with private sector companies to ask them to disclose their current understanding of their "forest footprint" based on exposure to five key commodities - soy, palm oil, timber, cattle products and biofuels - in their operations and/or their supply chains.   All these commodities have the potential to be sourced from recently deforested land.
• BioCarbon Tracker uses satellite data to map the ecosystems where biocarbon is stored, identify vegetation at risk from land use change and monitor where high biocarbon stock land such as forest is converted to agriculture. It is a free service provided by Greenergy in association with Ecometrica, the University of Edinburgh and the UK’s National Centre for Earth Observation. 
• Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is a multi-stakeholder organization that develops certified forest management and chain of custody standards that provide a credible link between responsible production and consumption of forest products.