Hello to the growing IBI community –
On behalf of the IBI Board of Directors, I hope everyone is enjoying a lovely summer, unless you’re in the Southern half of the globe, and in that case, you are having a wonderful winter or rainy season.
For those of us in summer, that time of heat and growing seasons, multiple extreme heat waves remind us of the existential challenges our home planet is facing. For many of us, it can be a reminder of why we labor, promote, advocate for, and use, biochar. Perhaps one silver lining of sharply rising petroleum-based fertilizer prices makes clear is the inherent unsustainability of them, and we hope, in turn, opens up opportunities for biochar, an inherently circular soil amendment and fertilizer.
Behind the scenes, IBI is laboring, too, and advocating, to bring knowledge and understanding of the why, what, and how, of biochar to as many people as possible. We’re doing this by working on an updated website. On this future website, you will be able to find a global map of biochar companies and projects – this is in beta testing right now.
More work: IBI Members receive a monthly list of new biochar scientific research. We are converting this static list into a searchable, curated database – this, too, is under development to help more people leverage the around 10,000+ published research papers on biochar. We also have some very exciting updates coming to IBI’s education efforts, but this is a story for another month.
Please make sure to keep up with IBI’s event schedule – our next will be on Sept. 14, our first virtual networking event – but this is just for our more than 500 members, so perhaps consider joining us if you haven’t already?
You can also see many upcoming biochar events – I hope to see many of you at USBI’s North American Biochar and Bioenergy Conference Aug. 8-10 at the University of West Virginia, United States, and then at the Swiss biochar association, CharNet, event CholeFest, Sept. 2-4 in Beatenberg, Switzerland.
Until next month (and really forever) – let’s help spread that mantra: Biochar – safe, scalable, and shovel-ready!
Char-fully Yours,
Kathleen Draper
IBI, Board Chair
Ithaka Institute for Carbon Intelligence, US Director
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