Kelpie Wilson – författare

With extensive research, real-world examples, and hands-on applications, this go-to guide offers a comprehensive look at the principles and practices of biochar—and all of its world-changing uses.Like many human discoveries, biochar has likely been invented, lost, and reinvented multiple times. It can be found in the rich terra preta soils of the Amazon and in the ancient “dark earths” dotting Africa, Asia, and Europe. However, biochar isn’t just an archeological curiosity. In The Biochar Handbook, author Kelpie Wilson argues that the simple process of burning organic material in a low-oxygen, low-emission environment could be one of the most powerful tools we have to restore degraded soils and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.In accessible and authoritative prose, Wilson demonstrates that biochar is a low-tech but effective means of reducing wildfire risks, restoring soil carbon, managing manure, weaning farms off of toxic inputs, and producing the best compost ever made.In this book, you’ll also find:A pocket history of biocharStep-by-step instructions on making biochar for yourselfApplications for soil water retention, pest deterrence, compost enhancement, and moreInspiring examples of ecosystem restoration and improved forest managementLow-cost recipes, including Cultured Biochar and Sustainable Potting Soil Wilson makes a compelling case that biochar is both simple to make and a potent solution to a host of knotty problems, both global and close to home. Whether you’re a gardener, homesteader, rancher, commercial farmer, permaculturalist, or forest manager, this book will show you how to put biochar to work, making you and your community more resilient as a result.

Biochar is the carbon-rich organic matter that remains after heating biomass under minimization of oxygen during a process called pyrolysis. Its relevance to deforestation, agricultural resilience, and energy production, particularly in developing countries, makes it an important issue. This report offers a review of what is known about opportunities and risks of biochar systems. Its aim is to provide a state of the art overview of current knowledge regarding biochar science. In that sense the report also offers a reconciling view on different scientific opinions about biochar providing an overall account that shows the various perspectives of its science and application. This includes soil and agricultural impacts of biochar, climate change impacts, social impacts, and competing uses of biomass.The report aims to contextualize the current scientific knowledge in order to put it at use to address the development- climate change nexus, including social and environmental sustainability. The report is organized as follows: chapter one offers some introductory comments and notes the increasing interest in biochar both from a scientific as well as from a practitioner’s point of view; chapter two gives further background on biochar, describing its characteristics and outlining the way in which biochar systems function. Chapter three then considers the opportunities and risks of biochar systems, chapter four presents a typology of biochar systems emerging in practice, particularly in the developing world.New, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14040-based life-cycle assessments of the net climate change impact and the net economic profitability of three biochar systems with data collected from relatively advanced biochar projects were conducted for this report and are presented in chapter five, providing a novel understanding of the full life-cycle impacts of these known biochar systems. Chapter six investigates various aspects of technology adoption, including barriers to implementing promising systems, focusing on economics, carbon market access, and sociocultural barriers.Finally, the status of knowledge regarding biochar systems is interpreted in chapter seven to determine potential implications for future involvement in biochar research, policy, and project formulation.