“P
AY D IRT
” C HARCOAL :
F INANCING L OCAL AND G LOBAL L AND C ONSERVATION WITH
C ARBON P AYMENTS FOR B IOCHAR IN A GRICULTURAL S OILS
A
NNE
S
HUDY
P
ALMER
1
Climate change complicates and threatens land conservation initiatives (Root and Schneider,
1996). Emerging carbon markets provide both a path to address climate change and opportunities to conserve land through carbon sequestration projects in forestry and agriculture. Another sequestration project type, the soil application of biochar, has great potential to address climate change, attract carbon finance, achieve land conservation, and even attain the sustainable development that has been elusive in carbon finance projects. In this paper, I describe biochar and its properties, review carbon markets and discuss how biochar can leverage them for land conservation, and highlight the conditions that will allow biochar projects to achieve these benefits.
Biochar is charcoal produced by pyrolyzing biomass (smoldering it in a low-oxygen environment) at relatively low temperatures, 400-500ºC. In addition to biochar, this process produces heat and gases that can be captured and used to produce energy carriers like electricity, bio-oils, or hydrogen (Lehmann, 2007).
Biochar can itself be burned as fuel, but a superior use is applying it to agricultural soils. Biochar retains nutrients far better than other types of organic matter (Lehmann, 2007) and improves the physical and biological properties of agricultural soil (Gaunt and Lehmann, 2008). The few field trials of agricultural biochar use have shown significant crop yield increases (Laird, 2008 citing
Glaser, 2002). In high-input agriculture, biochar increases the crop yield per unit of fertilizer used and reduces runoff-related pollution (Gaunt and Lehmann, 2008).
More tellingly, biochar appears to have allowed highly productive agriculture in Amazonia for pre-Columbian Amerindians. Several explorers to the Amazon in the 1500s reported large, densely populated settlements along riverbanks in areas that now average one person per square kilometer (Smith, 1980). Twentieth-century excavations of these archaeological sites reveal areas of terra preta – black earth – that are much darker and more fertile than the surrounding weathered tropical soils, containing up to three times more phosphorous and nitrogen and 18 times more carbon (Marris, 2006). The biochar in these soils is thought to result from incomplete combustion in low-heat hearth fires accumulating over a settlement’s extended habitation
(hundreds of years). Today, indigenous groups in the region recognize this soil as important for agriculture, and it is sold in cities as a lawn and garden fertilizer (Smith, 1980).
As the terra preta example suggests, biochar is highly stable in soil and its agricultural benefits are long-lived. Current field and laboratory experiments suggest the carbon in biochar will persist in the soil for hundreds of years (Lehmann, Gaunt, & Rondon, 2006), while terra preta and other examples of charcoal in soil suggest a millennial timescale.
1 Anne Shudy Palmer is a second year graduate student at University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin where she is studying environmental management. She can be reached at ajshudy@wisc.edu
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Thus, when biochar is applied to soil, the energy that was generated during its production goes beyond carbon-neutral to become carbonnegative : The biomass feedstock withdrew carbon from the atmosphere as it grew, and approximately 50% of that carbon (Lehmann et al., 2006) is sequestered for hundreds or thousands of years when the biochar is applied to the soil.
Additionally, soil application of biochar has been shown to reduce the soil emissions of two other potent greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxide, by an unknown mechanism (Gaunt and Lehmann, 2008).
The application of biochar to agricultural soils thus mitigates climate change through the production of carbon-negative energy, improves soils’ chemical and physical properties, and reduces runoff-related environmental pollution. These combined agricultural and climate benefits make biochar an excellent candidate for obtaining conservation finance through carbon markets.
The goal of a carbon market is to reduce carbon emissions effectively and efficiently.
Participants in a carbon market each have an emission reduction target that they can meet by reducing their own emissions, trading emission permits with another market participant, or, in many cases, purchasing credits for emission reductions or sequestered carbon from entities outside the market (“carbon offsets”). Carbon markets effectively mitigate climate change because greenhouse gases have the same climate impact regardless of where they are emitted, so emission reductions have the same benefit regardless of where they occur. They are efficient
(cost-effective) because participants can purchase emission reductions when the price of these credits is lower than the cost of reducing their own emissions (EcoSecurities, 2008).
The Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which entered into force in 2005, established national emission reduction goals for participating countries as well as market mechanisms for meeting these goals. A number of other carbon markets have emerged within and outside the Kyoto Protocol, notably the European Union
Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), markets in Japan and Australia, and, in the United States, three regional regulatory markets and the Chicago Climate Exchange, a national voluntary market.
In each of these markets, participants can purchase carbon offsets to meet a portion of their emission reduction target. Under the Kyoto Protocol, the Clean Development Mechanism
(CDM) establishes quality standards for offsets. In voluntary carbon markets, where unregulated institutions and individuals voluntarily purchase offsets to support the market and claim carbon neutrality, many other offset standards can ensure quality (Kollmuss, Zink, & Polycarp, 2008).
In addition to effectiveness and efficiency, carbon markets can promote equity by facilitating the transfer of money and low-carbon technology from developed to developing countries, rewarding and encouraging the developing countries in reducing their emissions even though they are least responsible for climate change (Stern 2008). The CDM intends that offset projects have sustainable development benefits for their host countries, but in practice many do not
(Holm Olsen, 2007), and the additional Gold Standard certification was developed to identify
CDM projects that actually promote sustainable development. Offset standards in the voluntary market reflect the same tension, with standards like the Voluntary Carbon Standard certifying
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emission reductions at the least cost, and standards like the Climate, Community, and
Biodiversity Standard certifying offsets’ sustainable development benefits (Kollmuss et al.,
2008).
In this landscape, the soil application of biochar has great potential to achieve real climate, sustainable development, and land conservation benefits, particularly in tropical forests threatened by shifting cultivation or fuel-wood collection. Applying biochar to soil can improve the soil’s fertility enough to farm on the same plot year after year, sparing forests from shifting cultivation. Pyrolysis-generated electricity can make fuel-wood unnecessary in some contexts, and the increased fertility of biochar-amended soil can sustainably produce fuel biomass on a single plot in other cases. The carbon payments that farmers receive for the sequestered carbon can justify the financial and time investment necessary to adopt biochar systems. Later the farmers can invest these carbon payments in local infrastructure and increased commodity production; together with the increased food and energy productivity of biochar systems, these carbon payments help realize the sustainable development benefits that have been so elusive under the CDM.
The Biochar Fund is currently testing this model in Central Africa. At its trial sites in Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Biochar Fund organizes farmers’ groups and helps them access agricultural inputs and markets; gets them started producing biochar, applying it to soil, and selling the resulting carbon credits; facilitates a village-scale system for electricity generation and distribution; and promotes the social services (health, education, etc.) made possible by abundant food and clean electricity. The result is that surrounding forest is conserved because it is more profitable to farm sustainably with biochar than to clear new land, the community’s food and energy insecurity are addressed, and the global climate is aided (Biochar
Fund, 2008).
The soil application of biochar can also achieve climate and conservation benefits in other contexts, including recycling agricultural wastes (Lehmann et al., 2006). For example, carbon payments could be used as an incentive for American farmers in the Mississippi River watershed to char crop residue and apply it to their fields. This would reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers and the nutrient pollution in runoff, furthering the conservation goals of mitigating climate change and reducing the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. However, the value of carbon in the
U.S. is not yet high enough to make this cost-effective for farmers (Gaunt and Lehmann, 2008), so it will initially be easier to achieve land conservation through biochar in tropical forests, where sustainable development needs provide an additional, “non-market” imperative to adopt the system.
Several of the necessary conditions for this system of conservation finance are already in place, including regulatory and voluntary carbon markets and the practice of aggregating small offset projects to cost-effectively sell them in global markets. However, two major barriers remain: a system for quantifying the carbon benefits and a robust certification standard must be developed.
Scientists must establish a way to quantify the climate benefits of different biochar feedstocks, application regimes, and geographical application locations. This system must be similar in goal to the CDM’s offset quantification tools but must be simple and generalized enough that it is not prohibitively expensive or time-consuming for small farmers. There is precedent for broad
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generalization in this area: For soil carbon sequestration in no-till agriculture and rangeland, the
Chicago Climate Exchange uses standard values over areas as large as several states (Chicago
Climate Exchange, 2008). Additionally, the biochar quantification tool must be adopted by one or more offset standards that certify the carbon and sustainable development benefits of such projects.
For the voluntary market, I propose using the Voluntary Carbon Standard to certify biochar projects’ carbon benefits, and the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Standard to certify their sustainable development benefits. In the regulatory markets of the Kyoto Protocol, the
CarbonZero Foundation (www.carbonzero.ch) is working to make biochar sequestration a
UNFCC-approved methodology. The CDM does not currently recognize soil carbon sequestration, but biochar’s stable and easily measured and verified carbon sequestration may change this.
In addition to carbon markets, biochar’s systems approach to sustainable development could attract conservation finance through international development aid, small-scale philanthropy
(e.g., globalgiving.com), and microfinance (e.g., kiva.org).
The significance of carbon payments for soil application of biochar to future land conservation initiatives can hardly be overstated. Climate change has the potential to negate all current land conservation initiatives by causing habitat shifts, species extinctions, and increasingly desperate resource exploitation among the world’s poorest people. Carbon payments for the soil application of biochar facilitate both the local conservation of tropical forests and other land types, and the global conservation of the Earth’s climate. The widespread adoption of biochar systems has the potential to generate carbon-negative energy, improve agricultural soils, reduce runoff-related pollution, preserve tropical forests, mitigate climate change, and promote sustainable development in the poorest regions of the world. These inspiring possibilities wait on only a robust quantification of their benefits and standards with which to certify them.
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