IBI Board
In June 2008, members of the IBI established roles for the organization – including staff and board duties. Our board currently has 12 members. Please see below for more information.
IBI also has a dedicated Advisory Committee consisting of 28 members with 5 sub-committees that focus on Policy, Biochar Production/Technology/Classification, Utilization in Soils, Commercialization, and Socio-Economic Evaluation. The members collectively speak seventeen languages and hail from twelve different countries including Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Kenya, Mongolia, Paraguay, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They represent a wide range of institutions and organizations including the academia/research community, small businesses, large corporations, non-profit organizations, and on-the-ground practitioners/farmers.
Current IBI Board Members include those listed below (click on a name for more information). We thank our former board members for all their support and hard work.

Kathleen Draper
IBI Board Chair, US Director – Ithaka Institute for Carbon Intelligence, United States
Kathleen Draper is IBI’s Board Chair and has been in the biochar industry for more than a decade.…She has co-authored two books about biochar (BURN: Using Fire to Cool the Earth and Terra Preta: How the World’s Most Fertile Soil Can Help Reverse Climate Change and Reduce World Hunger) and written and spoken about biochar to audiences around the globe. She is the US Director for the Ithaka Institute for Carbon Intelligence, a non-profit, open source organization focused on the use of biochar in climate farming, agroforestry as well as other industrial uses of biochar. She is also a co-founder of C-interest, a materials company working to commercialize biochar based composites.. She has a Master’s degree in Managing for Sustainability. Prior to becoming involved with the biochar world, she worked for an international consulting firm working on various internal and external areas including project and knowledge management, human resources, and more.Read more