• Corpus ID: 34615946

Biochar for Climate Change Mitigation : Fact or Fiction ?

@inproceedings{Ernsting2009BiocharFC,
  title={Biochar for Climate Change Mitigation : Fact or Fiction ?},
  author={Almuth Ernsting and Rachel A. Smolker},
  year={2009}
}

• A. Ernsting, R. Smolker
• Published 2009
• Environmental Science

Soils are extremely diverse and dynamic, playing a fundamental role in supporting communities of plants, detritivores (which break down organic matter) and microbial communities, interacting with the atmosphere, regulating water cycles and much more. As we face the catastrophic impacts of climate change, efforts to “engineer” the climate are proliferating. Among these is a proposal to use soils as a medium for addressing climate change by scaling up the use of biochar. Unfortunately, like other such schemes to engineer biological systems, it is based on a dangerously reductionist view of the natural world, which fails to recognize and accommodate ecological complexity and variation.