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Odisha & Assam India

Support our Smallholder farmer project

On average, European citizens have a carbon footprint of 10 tons carbon dioxide on a yearly basis. This is of course dependent on your lifestyle. You can calculate your carbon footprint more precisely by clicking here.

With your contribution to this project, your carbon footprint is compensated, but you also make possible a lot more socio-economic benefits for the local farmer communities. Below you can find out what you will be supporting.

If you are looking to make an impact with or for your company, please contact us!

Compensate Your Footprint

Values

1. No poverty

Farmers are well paid for the production of biochar with money derived from carbon credit sales. This is a second source of income besides regular farming. The produced biochar is applied on the fields of the farmer. Therefore, farmers also become less dependent on the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, of which the price is increasing steeply.

2. Zero hunger

In the Odisha region, farmers deal with depleted grounds and long periods of drought. Most of them are rice farmers and have a little garden for their own food supply. Biochar is proven to increase crop yield, nutritional value and resistance to insects and drought.

3. Good health & well-being

Biomass is not always valued in the Odisha region. Therefore, to get rid of it, farmers light the residues on fire on their fields. This leads to misty smoke clouds which are detrimental for the health of the farmers.Also, biochar captures and holds heavy metals and other toxic elements, which thus do not end up in the edible parts of the plant, but are kept isolated in the ground.

5. Gender equality

By employing women as artisanal farmers as well as (head) supervisors, a position of equality is created. Women will be directing and working besides men in an equal way. Women will also be paid an equal amount of money for an equal amount of work. In giving women key roles in the system, we empower them.

8. Decent work & economic growth

The biochar will increase yields for their own production, leading to actual growth of their income. Dutch Carboneers is supporting an extra source of income for the whole region. This evokes not only extra jobs directly but also economic growth in the whole region for work that is better paid than rice production.

10. Reduced inequalities

Artisanal biochar production by farmers in India includes a financial movement from large wealthy corporations to the hard working, generally poor farmers. With the financial influx from wealthy to poor, Dutch Carboneers aim is to reduce the financial inequalities between the Global North and the Global South.

12. Responsible consumption & production

Rice farmers often burn the rice straw residues in the field. Besides being detrimental for the climate, it is foremost a waste of natural goods. With production of biochar the earlier regarded waste is transformed into a soil enhancer for the farm.

13. Climate action

With biochar production, carbon stored in biomass is brought from the short term and active carbon cycle towards the long term and inactive carbon cycle. Depending on the quality of biochar, carbon is stabilized in the soil for at least a hundred and up to a thousand years. Besides the direct carbon sink, biochar also has a measurable positive influence on microbial life in the soil and thus the organic carbon content.

14. Life below water

Because of the porous internal structure of biochar, nutrients are attracted and stored in biochar, this prevents leaching out of nutrients into surrounding surface water and thus eutrophication. Eutrophication of waterways lead to uncontrollable algal blooms and the suffocation of life below water.

15. Life on land

Besides biochar production, a variety of trees are planted throughout the project area. In the project area there is a huge monoculture of rice. The planting of various trees at the borders of each farm creates a more biodiverse ecosystem instead of the present rice monoculture. Biochar also is applied in farming soils, where it helps fight desertification, makes arid areas fertile again and increases micro-biological life in the soil.

Compensate Your Footprint