To fight or adapt? One seems hopeless but active, the other helpless and reactive. I remember when the climate conversation began shifting to focus on adaptation more than a decade ago. It felt like giving up and giving in. Capitulation to the fossil fuel forces’ relentless deny and delay efforts.
Mitigation is often framed as fighting for future generations while adaptation is an acknowledgement that the adverse impacts of climate are upon us and we need to adjust to our new reality asap. Homes need more insulation and more air conditioning. Cities and rural environments need to adjust to more floods and more drought. Coastal communities need to adjust to rising seas and salty soils.
At the moment the amount of money being spent on adaptation is less than a tenth of what is spent on mitigation but by 2050 it is anticipated that adaptation costs will be more than 6 times mitigation efforts. The carbon markets incentivize both reductions and removals, but adaptation is completely ignored in buyers’ decisions for CDR credits. International policy has also primarily focused on how to reduce the impacts of climate as can be seen in the various IPCC reports and the discussions at the Conference of the Parties. Positioning mitigation and adaptation as an either/or funding option is understandable particularly when paying for either of these has been so challenging. I believe it is also misguided. We are at the stage when ‘BOTH/AND’1 should be the optimal lens for funding decisions.
Luckily some CDR strategies can do both. Biochar is one of them (not the only one) but nearly all biochar conversations fixate on sequestration – with how much, how soon and how durable being the main questions bandied about by the entire carbon market industry and most of the biochar industry as well. Perhaps it’s time to shift or balance the conversation to include the growing number of ways biochar is being demonstrated to help communities and farmers adapt to climate chaos.
Biochar can help make agriculture more resilient to droughts while also reducing emissions from livestock manure and fertilizer usage. Using biochar in green roofs reduces the heat island effect, improves stormwater management and energy efficiency in the buildings below all while storing carbon. It’s long been shown to boost food security in early indigenous cultures as well as those in modern day communities particularly in the global South. Water management has not yet leveraged biochar at scale, but communities in Scandinavia have been using it for urban tree planting and found massive benefits in flood control as well. Pioneers in India have used it in recharging pits to raise groundwater levels from 1,200 below the surface to a mere 200 feet below. Wetland and mangrove restoration projects can leverage biochar in nurseries to boost tree survivability and regulate nutrient pollution in coastal areas. Reforestation efforts get a boost in early growth and survivability when biochar is applied to new plantings as well. Foresters are increasingly using pyrolysis to reduce fuel loads and invasive species that pose wildfire risks while using the resulting biochar to add carbon and microbial life to soils. Downed biomass from disasters is being turned into biochar and used to restore soils damaged by toxins, erosion and other flooding impacts. And the built environment is seeing biochar used in asphalt to increase heat resistance, in concrete to add insulation, and in a growing number of building materials to provide humidity control all while storing carbon for decades to centuries.
Funders for adaptation are still somewhat scarce, largely international organizations such as the UNFCCC Adaptation Fund or national governments coming to the aid of countries in the Global South. If those looking at carbon markets could take a more holistic approach to their carbon portfolio, perhaps the balance between funding for mitigation versus adaptation could begin to balance out, saving countless millions facing current climate emergencies.
I’ve updated a slide I created a decade ago on this topic based on various new biochar research and products that have evolved. What is missing?
