PyroScale: Pathways to Upscale Biochar Projects, FHNW School of Engineering and Environment

Biochar is considered a promising approach to permanently bind CO₂ while simultaneously improving soil quality. Especially in regions of the Global South, it offers significant potential for sustainable agriculture and climate protection.

Despite numerous pilot projects, large-scale implementation remains limited. Many initiatives fail to move beyond local applications and transition into scalable, long-term viable solutions. There is a lack of systematic knowledge on which factors enable successful scaling and how these can be applied across different social, political, and economic contexts.

The project «PyroScale – Pathways to Upscale Biochar Projects» aims to generate robust insights into the successful scaling of biochar projects.

The focus is on:

• Identifying key success factors for scaling pyrolysis/biochar projects
• Developing robust and practical transformation pathways for selected pyrolysis/biochar projects
• Deriving actionable recommendations for organisations engaged in international cooperation

We use Strategic Niche Management framework and apply Qualitative Comparative Analysis to evaluate ca. 40 pyrolysis/biochar projects in Burkina Faso, Jordan and Vietnam and derive socio-technical success factors for upscaling. We will then use the causal process tracing method to run an in-depth analysis of one of the successful cases and identify the causal mechanisms of upscaling these projects. Based on these insights, the research team and local stakeholders will apply a novel backcasting framework in a transdisciplinary process to co-develop socio-politically robust pathways in two projects that have yet to upscale.