There is a siren song echoing through the agricultural world, and it sounds like a pyrolysis machine. The tune is alluring. Take the mountains of “waste” from vast plantations—palm kernel shells, sugarcane bagasse, rice husks—, and turn them into biochar. Sell the resulting carbon credits, and you have a perfect, profitable loop of sustainability.
It’s a compelling story. So compelling, in fact, that it’s driving a boom in projects designed to do just that. But as a practitioner who has seen how good intentions can be distorted by market pressures, I believe we must approach this with extreme caution. We have to ask the sharpest question in the carbon market playbook: is this truly additional?
Additionality is the bedrock principle of a credible carbon credit. It means the climate benefit—the removal of carbon from the atmosphere—would not have happened without the project and the financial incentive from the credit. In this context, it forces us to untangle a crucial question. Are we funding a new, vital climate intervention, or are we simply creating a clever accounting mechanism to monetize an existing waste stream?
The line between the two can be perilously thin.
In the best-case scenario, the answer is clear. A plantation has been dumping its empty fruit bunches in massive, decomposing piles, releasing potent methane into the atmosphere for years. A new biochar facility, made financially viable only by the sale of carbon credits, converts that methane source into a stable carbon sink. This is a clear, unambiguous, and additional climate win. This is what the system is designed to reward.
But the real world is rarely so neat. The “waste” at the heart of these projects is often not waste at all. It can be a vital, albeit informal, part of a local ecosystem and economy.
A project leader, focused on the operational realities within the plantation fenceline, might rightly question my perspective on empty fruit bunches. But looking at the wider landscape beyond the plantation provides an answer. Empty fruit bunches may already have a job in the informal economy and the local ecological loop:
- A Substrate for Livelihoods — For smallholder farmers, these “waste” bunches are a valuable resource for cultivating edible mushrooms. This is a significant cottage industry in many regions. Removing this free resource to centralize it for biochar production can directly eliminate a source of income for dozens of families.
- An Ecological Subsidy for Soil Health — Returning this biomass to the fields is a long-standing practice for maintaining fertility. Empty fruit bunches are a massive source of organic matter and, crucially, potassium. Removing them from the ecosystem on an industrial scale risks degrading the soil and creating a long-term dependency on synthetic fertilizers—which have their own carbon footprint.
- A Source of Low-Cost Energy — Local communities and small-scale industries have relied on access to this agricultural residue as a cheap, accessible source of fuel.
This is where the carbon accounting gets complicated and where the principle of leakage comes into play. If a project diverts biomass that was already fertilizing a field, feeding a family’s small business, or fueling a local enterprise, it may inadvertently force those people to buy synthetic fertilizers or find other, potentially higher-emission, sources of energy.
The integrity of a project hinges on proving these domino effects are not occurring. The math must be transparent and the baseline—what would have happened without the project—must be rigorously defended, not conveniently assumed.
Leading certifiers have methodologies designed to test for these things. They are the market’s immune system. But a methodology is only as strong as the transparency and honesty of the data fed into it. This isn’t a critique of any single project; it’s a critical observation of a systemic pressure. The immense demand for scalable carbon removal risks prioritizing volume over verifiable impact.
The burden of proof must be absolute. The ultimate test is not whether a project can check the boxes on a certification form, but whether it leaves the entire ecosystem—the soil, the local community, and the climate—measurably better off.
Because if we get this wrong, we risk turning the carbon market into an exercise in clever accounting, one where we’re too busy watching the transaction to notice that nothing has fundamentally changed.
