A Year Full of Promise

Dear biocharmers,

July marks a new fiscal year at IBI, and it starts full of promise: new partnerships, expanded educational resources, and our 20th anniversary celebration. There will be a big moment in August, when we gather in Zhengzhou for ICBRA2026 because it’s where the field’s next moves on carbon removal and biochar tech get hashed out — and IBI’s 20th anniversary makes this one a bit of a milestone.

But before we get into what’s coming, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the one we just closed. During FY2026, IBI produced important resources and made real progress. We published the second Global Biochar Market Report, launched the Biochar Operator Course, contributed to the operationalization of the Biochar Resilience Network, and built lasting alliances with biochar organizations in Italy, Germany, Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Today our network counts 350+ members across 56 countries. IBI has trained more than 3,000 people in its courses, webinars and events. Read the full story – your story – in our FY2026 Annual Report.

This July also marks the close of a chapter that merits a special note of gratitude. In 2021, the Woka Foundation placed its confidence in IBI with a five-year capacity-building grant — and the resources that it offered represented an unprecedented investment that transformed IBI’s technical and organizational capacity. With Woka’s support, IBI grew from a small, largely volunteer-driven network into a professionally staffed organization, guided by a Board-approved 2024–2030 Strategic Plan. Woka support allowed us to bring Biochar Academies to the US, Thailand and Kenya, study tours to Switzerland, Italy and Wales, scholarships to students in low- and middle-income countries, and to publish the Global Biochar Market Report, which the sector now uses as a standard reference. Gracias, Woka, de todo corazón, from all of us in the biochar community.

In the months ahead we will gather in important biochar fora with peers from every corner of the sector’s ecosystem who constitute the richness of our community: scientists, researchers, innovators, academics, market developers, registries, investors, project developers, government agencies, technology developers, dMRV providers, and more. IBI is creating a multisectoral, multidisciplinary space where viejos lobos de mar and startuperos sit at the same table in order to to learn, scale, innovate, and create awareness about biochar’s untapped potential.

The beginning of our new fiscal year is a good opportunity to pause, reflect and acknowledge how much the global biochar community has achieved in such a short time. It works with nature to regenerate soils and capture CO². It transforms environmental liabilities into assets by repurposing organic residues. It builds knowledge, generates new skills, creates opportunities for real world projects, and improves  social impact in the regions where it works. This community stands at the forefront of the fight against climate change — removing carbon from the atmosphere and locking it away for a very long time.

While we never stop maravillándonos at the fantastic thing that biochar is, we should never forget that it takes people, cooperation, and information to produce it.

Happy new fiscal year to all. See you in Zhengzhou, in Bogotá, at COP31, in New Orleans and wherever biochar is happening.

With gratitude,

Luisa Marin de Block
Executive Director, International Biochar Initiative