Biocharists,
MAJOR endorsement of biochar in the battle against climate change!!! Essential to read at least the abstract below and the one copied paragraph from the article that mentions biochar (both with yellow highlights by me)
1. From peer reviewed “Frontiers in Climate” journal.
2. Quotable citations by CDR scholars, none of whom are focused on biochar. We need their endorsements whenever possible.
3. Puts biochar into the “good guys” category along with silicate weathering and soil carbon sequestration, both of which we should be embracing to help get biochar accepted by farmers..
4. One cited reference from a biochar article, Sunberg, et. al 2020.
Paul
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2022 8:12 AM
To: CarbonDioxideRemoval@googlegroups.com
Subject: [CDR] Negative erosion and negative emissions: Combining multiple land-based carbon dioxide removal techniques to rebuild fertile topsoils and enhance food production
[PSA>>] Link to full article:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fclim.2022.928403/full
07 September 2022
Authors
Ivan A. Janssens, Dries Roobroeck, Jordi Sardans, Michael Obersteiner, Josep Peñuelas, Andreas Richter, Pete Smith, Erik Verbruggen and Sara Vicca
Abstract
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) that increases the area of forest cover or bio-energy crops inherently competes for land with crop and livestock systems, compromising food security, or will encroach natural lands, compromising biodiversity.
Mass deployment of these terrestrial CDR technologies to reverse climate change therefore cannot be achieved without a substantial intensification of agricultural output, i.e., producing more food on less land. This poses a major challenge, particularly in
regions where arable land is little available or severely degraded and where agriculture is crucial to sustain people’s livelihoods, such as the Global South.
Enhanced silicate weathering, biochar amendment, and soil carbon sequestration are CDR techniques that avoid this competition for land and may even bring about multiple co-benefits for food production.
This paper elaborates on the idea to take these latter CDR technologies a step further and use them not only to drawdown CO2 from the atmosphere, but also to rebuild fertile soils (negative erosion) in areas that suffer from pervasive land degradation and
have enough water available for agriculture. This way of engineering topsoil could contribute to the fight against malnutrition in areas where crop and livestock production currently is hampered by surface erosion and nutrient depletion, and thereby alleviate
pressure on intact ecosystems. The thrust of this perspective is that synergistically applying multiple soil-related CDR strategies could restore previously degraded soil, allowing it to come back into food production (or become more productive), potentially
alleviating pressure on intact ecosystems. In addition to removing CO2 from the atmosphere, this practice could thus contribute to reducing poverty and hunger and to protection of biodiversity.
Source: Frontiers
[PSA>>] paragraph copied from the article, in the subsection “Increasing and maintaining soil organic matter stocks”:
In parallel to these classic techniques for building up soil organic matter,
adding biochar will also help maintaining or increasing soil organic matter stocks (Smith et al., 2016). The incorporation
of carbonized plant biomass into agricultural land is a CDR
with high permanence and potentially large co-benefits on soil nutrient and water retention, as well as on biotic communities (Jeffery et al., 2017). A study Kenya
showed that biochar-producing gasifier cookstoves incentivized farmers to collect excess residues from crops which they otherwise burn in the field, thereby displacing firewood and decreasing CO2
emissions (Sundberg et al., 2020). Farm surveys in Uganda of available
residues from common staple crops demonstrated that turning these into biochar could annually sequester 0.20 to 1.15 ton C ha−1, whereas the ambitious target of the “4 per mille” initiative is
0.6 ton C ha−1 (Rumpel et al., 2018;
Roobroeck et al., 2019).
Amendment of biochar to tropical soils was proven to increase crop yields for more than a decade, under favorable and unfavorable rainfall, as a result of improved soil pH and water holding capacity (Kätterer
et al., 2019). Farmer households and agribusinesses thus profit from having low-cost energy and recurrent yield gains. Plans are being developed to scale this up, with farmers bringing their residues to nearby gasification plants for captive use of heat
in drying processes and/or electricity generation for lowering costs of production or selling to provide income. In this closed-loop model,
biochar will be added to inorganic fertilizers and then incorporated in the soils to increase crop productivity and nutrient use efficiency and reduce N2O emissions.
************* Nice to have some favorable reporting about biochar by those who are not focused on biochar. ***********
Doc / Dr TLUD / Paul S. Anderson, PhD
Email: psanders@ilstu.edu Skype: paultlud
Phone: Office: 309-452-7072 Mobile & WhatsApp: 309-531-4434
Websites: https://woodgas.com see Resources for 1) biochar white paper, 2) RoCC kilns, and 3) the Quick Picks for TLUD stove technology. The full DrTLUD.com website
is moving to woodgas.com .
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