BioChar - Could bamboo solve Africa’s deforestation crisis?

Deforestation in Africa is a continental and global crisis. Illegal and legal logging, shifting agriculture, subsistence living, charcoal production and fuel wood collection is taking a tremendously devastating toll on the continent’s natural resources. Almost 90% of the entirety of West Africa’s rainforests have been destroyed alone, with the entire continent of Africa losing more than half of its primary forest in the last five years. That is a terrifying statistic, and it should rightly scare you. Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, the vast majority of the rural populations rely on subsistence living and shifting agriculture to survive. These communities have the right to provide for themselves and their families. A lack of national infrastructure, lack of efficient agricultural inputs, lack of access to alternative domestic fuels and inefficient cook stoves gives these rural populations few alternatives but to rely on their ever-depleting natural resources to meet their basic human needs.

Africa desperately needs to find an alternative sustainable domestic fuel source rather than relying on the continent’s natural resources. The continent also needs a solution to halting its shifting agriculture trend. It’s likely that bamboo could contribute to solving both problems through BioChar.

Firstly, what is BioChar? BioChar is a high-carbon form of charcoal, around 70-80% carbon, and is produced through the heating of organic matter in an oxygen free environment. This process is called ‘pyrolysis’. BioChar’s purity means that it does not degrade easily. From the pyrolysis process, BioChar develops minute pores throughout its structure, massively increasing the substances surface area. All of these characteristics means BioChar has many beneficial applications in agriculture that could have far reaching and long-lasting impact throughout Africa. BioChar’s agricultural benefits include:

• Carbon content: BioChar’s high purity and carbon content means it can be mixed in with soil, locking carbon in the soil for decades, not only from the BioChar, but also captured from the crops.
• Water retention: BioChar in soils, through its large surface area and aerated structure, can hold and retain water, saving plants from drought for longer than normal soil.
• pH: BioChar buffers acidic soils, improving their pH and therefore increasing plants nutrient uptake.
• Nutrient absorption: BioChar is a substrate for nutrients and can increase the efficiency of fertiliser.
• Microbiology: BioChar’s honeycomb structure becomes a home for beneficial microbes, improving plant health.

So, what is shifting agriculture and how canBioChar provide a solution to this trend in Africa? Shifting agriculture is a destructive process whereby a farmer will deforest and clear an area of land, farm this land intensively for three to four years until the soil’s nutrients have been utterly exhausted, then repeating the process within a new area, leaving the old piece of land to slowly revert to bushland. This is happening at a continental scale. If the land being used by farmers can, in a low cost and sustainable way, be made to remain more productive for longer, this would represent a massive reduction in the shifting agricultural trend and would result in the relative reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation. BioChar is a solution. But BioChar still needs a biomass source to create and, so far, this is still reliant on Africa’s natural resources.

Every year, over 90% of all wood produced in Sub-Saharan Africa is used for fuel. The average annual deforestation rate of Sub-Saharan Africa is over 0.8%. By 2030 over 2 billion people, mainly living in Africa, will still rely on fuelwood and charcoal for cooking. The world needs solutions. Many carbon projects today focus on providing more efficient cookstoves, to increase the efficiency of fuelwood use and reduce the rate of deforestation. This is progress, but it doesn’t solve the problem. Other projects focus on afforestation, looking to regulate sustainable timber production to provide an established source of fuelwood, negating the need for deforestation. Sustainable timber projects still face the challenge of scale and the sheer length of time it takes to grow a tree to a harvestable size as well as the high capital costs and infrastructure demands such a venture requires. Considering the high cost of afforestation establishment, most project developers would rather grow expensive hardwoods, choosing profit, over climate. The problems Africa face are vast and complex, could bamboo really provide an all-in-one solution?

How can bamboo solve this crisis and if it really is a solution, why isn’t it being done already? Well, let’s first look at why bamboo seems to tick the right boxes.

Bamboo plants have many characteristics that present the species as a suitable replacement biomass resource to wood; It is fast growing, high biomass, grows in dense clumps, is regenerative, long lived and it can grow on a wide variety of soils and climatic conditions. Once a bamboo plant is mature, which takes approximately 4-5 years, it will grow new culms each year. A mature bamboo plant can produce upwards of 40 culms, sprouting new culms every year at their full, final mature diameter, and they grow to their full height in as little as 30-60 days, without needing to be re-seeded. If cultivated correctly, this means a single bamboo plant can continuously be rotated, harvesting a selection of mature culms, allowing new culms to grow, and maintaining enough of the clump to ensure the bamboo thrives and generates enough energy to continue the cycle. Given the right cultivation and growing conditions, a single bamboo plant is capable of sequestering up to 500 kg of carbon dioxide every year.

A core barrier to introducing bamboo farming to Africa is a lack of understanding and access to information on the cultivation and management of bamboo plantations, as well as a difficulty in accessing the required seed-stock to get started. Bamboo plants can live for over 100 years, but a fascinating yet hindering aspect to bamboo biology is that they flower ‘gregariously’. Meaning that, relatively unpredictably, all the bamboo plants will flower at exactly the same time and, for the majority of bamboo plants, once a bamboo plant flowers and produces seeds, the plant dies. In this event the entire plantation needs to be replanted, at which point you have a re-established bamboo plantation with the sometimes 100+ year clock reset back to zero. This would represent a cost to the farmer in establishing the new plantation and in any lost revenue whilst the plantation re-matures.

Introducing bamboo as a biomass resource for the rural populations of Sub-Saharan Africa could be a game changer in the fight against deforestation and the road to net zero. Processing bamboo’s high biomass culms into BioChar would give these rural communities access to both a sustainable and low-cost source of domestic fuel and a cheap agricultural input that would help elongate their lands usefulness. Both would theoretically represent a massive impact on reducing deforestation and the significant prevention of greenhouse gas emissions. If we are able to get the bamboo equation right; developing a continental bamboo infrastructure that gives rural communities access to cheap, sustainable biomass for fuel and agricultural inputs, in a controlled manner, then, on paper, it would be a giant step in the right direction.

From our side, we think bamboo is a really interesting and exciting opportunity. We are developing pilot forestry programmes alongside our re-forestation projects in Western Africa and are looking to explore just how bamboo could practically be introduced and impact rural communities.

“Tomorrow belongs to people who prepare for it today.” – African proverb.