By Dr Arvind Kumar
Recent extreme acts of nature around the world, from Pakistan’s flooding and Moscow’s heat wave and wildfires, to the large ice sheet that broke off of the Petermann Glacier in Greenland, are proof of the climate system’s vulnerability and make it clear that fast mitigation is urgently required to avoid further disastrous climate-related events.
According to a study published on 10 August 2010 in Nature Communications, Biochar could solve a significant piece of the climate problem – 12 percent of CO2 emissions. The authors of this study conclude that turning biomass waste into biochar could be more effective in mitigating climate change than using it to produce biofuels, which could mitigate 10 percent of CO2 emissions compared to biochar’s 12 percent, although they note that the climate benefits of biofuel vs biochar can vary by region.
It is further revealed from the study that Biochar is produced through a process called pyrolysis: heating waste biomass at low temperatures with very little oxygen to produce a char. The biochar is a stable form of carbon that sequesters the CO2 that plant biomass would normally release when decomposing. Besides helping fight climate change, biochar can also be used a soil amendment in programs to enrich soils lacking in nutrients for food production.
According to Durwood Zaelke, President of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development “Biochar is a winning climate strategy that policymakers need to start supporting now to start drawing down excess CO2 that is on the verge of pushing the climate system past the tipping point for irreversible climate changes.”
Other carbon-negative measures include:
• Better management of forests;
• Implementing sustainable practices in the agricultural sector;
• Perfecting new technologies such as air capture of CO2 (capturing air and “scrubbing” out the CO2); and
• Calera’s process of capturing CO2 from power plants and other sources and precipitating it out as solid calcium carbonate that may be able to replace part of the cement used in the production of concrete.
