Sebastian Scholz - Böcker

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.

Karl Valentin once asked: "How can it be that only as much happens as fits into the newspaper the next day?" He focussed on the problem that information of the past has to be organised, arranged and above all: selected and put into form in order to be perceived as a whole. In this sense, the process of selection must be seen as the fundamental moment – the “Urszene” – of making History. This book shows selection as highly creative act. With the richness of early medieval material it can be demonstrated that creative selection was omnipresent and took place even in unexpected text genres.The book demonstrates the variety how premodern authors dealt with "unimportant", unpleasant or unwanted past. It provides a general overview for regions and text genres in early medieval Europe.

In a timely contribution to the international discussion of the post-Kyoto climate regime this study hypothesizes that Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects in the land use and forestry sector are an efficient instrument for climate change mitigation that contributes to rural development and poverty alleviation at the same time. To this end, the study analyzes socio-economic aspects of a forestry project established under the CDM rules considering an East African case study exemplarily. An agricultural household survey in Tanzania delivered the empirical data for the structural equation model at the center of the analysis. Looking at different farm assets it is shown that the benefits of land use-related climate projects go way beyond pure mitigation. They also have a positive impact on a very broad asset base on which poor farm households depend. Hence, the current CDM only allowing for afforestation and reforestation projects is far too restricted to deliver on its twin objective.