The Future of Biochar Is Not European – It’s Global, Distributed, and Southern
Michael Shafer
ABSTRACT
The issue is not artisanal, distributed biochar today. It’s the future. And the future, inescapably, is about the numbers.
There is no denying the central role Europe currently plays in the global biochar story. Europe purchases the most biochar and has developed the world’s most robust carbon credit markets. It is also the only region that has integrated biochar and negative emissions technologies into coherent climate policies. In sheer market terms, Europe rules. Its centralized, large-scale, corporate-driven production model also dominates. And for now, that dominance has left artisanal or distributed production especially the kind practiced by smallholders in the Global South on the margins.
But the future is not decided by today’s market dominance. The future is decided by scale, feedstock availability, and the basic math of climate mitigation. And on all those fronts, Europe’s current dominance is fragile. It risks irrelevance if it continues to write off artisanal biochar and the distributed production models that make use of the world’s largest untapped carbon sink: the agricultural waste streams of the Global South.
