The Biochar Fund is a social profit fund that completely changes the way in which chronic hunger, deforestation, energy access and climate change are addressed amongst the world's poorest populations: small subsistence farmers at the tropical forest frontier. The fund's systemic interventions create a synergy that breaks and reverses an environmentally destructive, unsustainable and socially catastrophic land use cycle. By doing so, we help communities gain the knowledge, tools and financial means needed to lift themselves out of poverty once and for all. Simultaneously, the biochar concept has the capacity to help tackle climate change in a significant and cost-effective way. It allows us to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The key to the system is the utilisation of biochar to restore the health of nutrient-poor, acidic tropical soils. Biochar is a revolutionary integrated soil management strategy that doubles as a carbon sink. Soils amended with biochar initiate a sustainable and highly productive land-use cycle: land becomes fertile, can be used productively for years, boosts crop yields, and thus helps eliminate both hunger and destructive "slash-and-burn" based shifting cultivation. Biochar also makes it possible to reclaim abandoned, depleted land and highly weathered soils, thus further reducing pressures on forests. Because of this, the Fund helps reduce deforestation and both the biodiversity loss and emissions that go with it, in a very pragmatic and effective way. We tackle the problem at the roots. Contrary to other, "top down" schemes aimed at slowing deforestation, ours is a "bottom up" approach that directly benefits people on the ground in a concrete manner. Conservation efforts are thus firmly rooted amongst the communities living at the forest margins.

Biochar not only boosts the fertility of the tropical problem soils, it also makes for a stable, manageable and easily measurable carbon sink for which carbon credits are available. Funds obtained for the carbon sequestration effort offer an additional source of income for the farmers, which is used to finance the synergy and guarantees the conservation of forests and their ecosystem services.

What is more, the production of biochar in village-scale pyrolysis plants is coupled to the generation of carbon-negative electricity, making renewable, low-carbon and decentralised energy services available to rural communities currently without access to modern energy. This transition limits the need for primitive, inefficient biomass use (burning on open fires) and dramatically reduces associated emissions. The switch to electricity also ends the health problems caused by indoor air pollution, which is responsible for an estimated 1.5 million deaths per year, mainly women and children.

Once the synergy between soil health and increased crop production has been achieved, the world's poorest farmers become carbon managers who keep adding biochar to their soils. The biochar is obtained from the residual biomass that grows on their now highly fertile fields. Since the soils become far more fertile, food crop yields improve dramatically, as does the output of residual biomass resulting from the higher productivity. More biomass means more biochar can be sequestered and more electricity can be generated. This ultimately leads to an integrated system that actively removes CO2 from the atmosphere.

As such, synergetic biochar systems can lead to drastically improved, sustainable agriculture and the elimination of hunger; make destructive "slash-and-burn" techniques and deforestation a thing of the past; provide access to modern and "negative emissions" energy; and result in strongly reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

All these significant social and environmental benefits can be achieved in a self-sustained way. The reversal of the unsustainable land use cycle allows the poorest communities to improve their livelihoods to such an extent that they can engage in income-generating activities: they can at last produce a surplus of food and obtain funds from managing the biochar carbon sink.

The Biochar Fund takes a phased but integrated approach: first, we help resource-poor farming communities gain access to modern agricultural inputs, markets and knowledge, which allows them to end hunger in one or two seasons; secondly, we help them implement the biochar soil management system to consolidate the gains; in a third step, we help connect the farmers who now manage a stable carbon sink, to global (voluntary) carbon markets; finally, the now resilient communities can acquire a small-scale pyrolysis system which offers them access to modern, renewable and carbon-negative energy and allows for the efficient production of biochar.

Each phase is implemented only after robust results from the previous phase are obtained. This ensures the communities have the means to finance the following step and fully claim ownership of it. The Biochar Fund's interventions thus offer a framework that allows the world's poorest to build self-sustained communities capable of meeting the most basic of needs: sufficient food, means to practise sustainable and income-generating agriculture, and modern energy services.

Welcome to the Biochar Fund.