f you have not heard about biochar, you will soon.

It is a new, and also a very old, tool to fight climate change and make our lives better at the same time. Archeologists examining the remains of ancient communities in the Amazon have found that the soil, termed terra preta, is black and fertile, unlike natural Amazonian soils. They deduced that people in these communities had used biochar to increase soil fertility and that the biochar has not broken down over millenia.

Biochar is almost pure carbon, made from organic material such as wood, crop residues, or even dried manure, which have been burned in a low oxygen and high temperature environment, between 450 C and 650 C. In this process, the more volatile compounds are driven off (this is called pyrolysis) leaving behind pure carbon. Wood or crop wastes, instead of being burned and increasing greenhouse gas emissions, as is common practice in farming and in forestry, can be used to produce biochar. This will fix the carbon for the long term in a product which is useful in improving........

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