Whose Carbon Capture ? A Bit of Good News

Global policy, policymakers and government representatives in the OECD countries routinely ignore the potential role to be played by carbon sequestration from crop waste biochar made by poor smallholders in the developing world. This paper argues that this is a mistake and makes the case for the design, development, and distribution of low-cost, low-tech biochar making equipment to the world's poorest farmers living on small farms and possessing only widely and thinly spread biomass resources on rough terrain. It argues that paying attention to the crop wastes of poor farmers can reduce GHG and PM2.5 emissions considerably and contends that the private motivations that underpin this approach can replace the talk of large-scale social behaviour change with a self-replicating system built on farmers' envy.