GlobalGiving “Protect Our Species – Reduce Global Warming” Climate Project Details
Every long journey – like reversing climate change – starts with a small step. You can start this critical journey by helping the poor farmers of a mountain village in North Thailand build a sustainable social enterprise to convert their crop waste into eco-friendly biochar.
How’s that? Small farmers? Climate change is about cars and trucks and power plants.
Well, not quite all of it. Poor farmers in small villages like Mae Wek all across the developing world burn 300 gigatons (billion metric tonnes) of crop waste annually, producing as much CO2 equivalent as 82,687 coal-fired power plants and as much smoke as 134,143,662,000,000 cigarettes.
Why?
Because they have no better alternative.
You can build a better alternative for Mae Wek, one that poor farmers can profitably imitate around the world. Your better alternative will help cool the planet, clean the air and put new money in the pockets of some of the poorest people on earth.
Sound too good to be true?
Keep reading.
Mae Wek village sits at the center of Mae Chaem District. Mae Wek’s crop waste is but a bit of Mae Chaem’s 94,999 tonnes of corn crop waste alone that farmers burn annually sending dense smoke cascading down into the valleys below. It is a scene repeated across North Thailand, the rest of Southeast Asia, East, Central and West Africa, Iran, India and Pakistan, Mexico and China.
Everywhere crop waste burns, there exists a climate cooling and environment cleaning alternative: converting that crop waste into biochar.
What’s biochar?
Super charcoal made by heating an biomass – such as crop waste – in the absence of oxygen. Making biochar is carbon negative – it removes CO2 from the atmosphere. Making biochar also eliminates the emission of CO2 equivalent, smog precursors and PM2.5.
Used in the soil, biochar increases porosity, water and nutrient retention, raises pH, restores soil life and damaged soil, and increases crop yields.
The issues in villages such as Mae Wek are can farmers make and sell biochar? You can answer yes to both questions by providing a village cooperative social enterprise that pays some farmers to make biochar and others to convert it into a saleable product. At the end of the year, the members – farmers and “factory workers” – divide the profits according to how much biochar each made or processed. Your system is profitable (and so sustainable) and enviable (and so likely to grow locally and be imitated by other villages, decreasing the amount of burning).
Biochar briquettes for cooking, smoke free, burn longer, hotter, environmentally healing.
Donate Now on GlobalGiving
Help us take a big step towards reducing agricultural smoke, smoke that kills, fuels global warming, and is one of the contributors to climate change that is threatening all species survival.
Warm Heart Worldwide is a registered 501.c.3 non-profit organization in the United States, our tax exemption number is 26-2059241. All donations are tax-deductible for U.S. Taxpayers. Warm Heart Foundation is a Registered Thai Charity
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