Aligning Biochar Product Regulation with Soil Science in EU Policy
A new Soil Advances (Elsevier) paper led by Dr Behrouz Gholamahmadi examines how European biochar governance can better connect product safety, circular biomass use, carbon removal, and soil-function outcomes.
Biochar is moving from a niche soil amendment towards a strategic tool for carbon dioxide removal, circular biomass use, and climate-resilient land management. However, a recent conceptual review published in Soil Advances (2026) highlights an important governance challenge: current European regulatory frameworks mainly assess biochar as a product before market placement, while many of its most relevant benefits emerge later through interactions with soil, water, and biological processes.
The paper, “Alignment between product-based regulation and soil process-based functions in biochar systems under EU policy,” was led by Dr Behrouz Gholamahmadi, R&D Director at Ibero Massa Florestal S.A., as first and corresponding author. The work was co-authored with Dr Luka Štrubelj, legal expert at PIC, Slovenia, and Dr Navraj Singh Ghaleigh, Senior Lecturer in climate law at the University of Edinburgh School of Law, UK. This interdisciplinary authorship strengthens the paper’s contribution at the interface of soil science, carbon removal, product regulation, waste legislation, and climate-governance policy.
Product regulation and soil processes
Current EU frameworks, including the Fertilising Products Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2019/1009, are essential for ensuring product safety, quality, contaminant control, and market access. These requirements provide an important baseline for responsible biochar deployment.
At the same time, soil science shows that biochar performance cannot be fully understood from product properties alone. Its effects on soil structure, water retention, microbial activity, nutrient dynamics, and carbon persistence depend on site-specific interactions with soil texture, mineralogy, climate, hydrology, and management.
This means that product compliance is necessary, but not sufficient, for assessing biochar’s long-term contribution to soil restoration, carbon durability, and climate adaptation.
The Mediterranean and Portuguese context
The paper discusses the Mediterranean context, including Portugal, where circular biochar systems could help valorise residual biomass from forestry, agriculture, and fire-prevention activities.
However, practical deployment can be slowed by fragmented regulatory pathways, including the absence of dedicated national End-of-Waste criteria for biochar and the need for case-by-case assessment.
This creates challenges for regional systems that aim to convert underused biomass streams, such as forest residues, pruning residues, olive-sector residues, and other agro-industrial by-products, into certified and safe biochar products.
In Mediterranean soils, where water limitation, acidification, erosion, and organic matter depletion are persistent constraints, regulation should increasingly recognise not only product quality, but also field-level soil-function outcomes.
The hydrological blind spot
One of the key messages of the paper is that biochar’s physical effects on soil hydrology remain underrepresented in current governance frameworks.
Biochar can influence pore-size distribution, aggregation, infiltration, soil water storage, runoff generation, and erosion processes. These effects are central to the “soil sponge function” and are particularly relevant under increasing hydroclimatic variability.
Global meta-analyses and field studies indicate that biochar can improve soil hydrological and physical properties and reduce surface runoff and water erosion, although the magnitude of these effects depends strongly on soil type, biochar properties, application rate, climate, and management.
Yet these functional outcomes are still poorly connected to product regulation, carbon certification, and emerging soil-monitoring policies.
Towards soil-informed biochar governance
To address this gap, the authors propose a more soil-informed and tiered Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification framework.
Tier 1 — Product compliance
Verification of feedstock origin, production conditions, carbon stability, contaminant thresholds, and product safety before market placement.
Tier 2 — Soil functional indicators
Field-feasible indicators that track how biochar affects soil structure, water retention, aggregate stability, biological activity, and other relevant soil functions.
Tier 3 — System-level outcomes
Longer-term assessment of broader outcomes such as erosion reduction, drought resilience, soil carbon protection, biomass circularity, and ecosystem-service delivery.
This approach does not replace product regulation. Instead, it complements it by linking safe biochar production with measurable soil-function benefits.
For Ibero Massa Florestal, this perspective supports a responsible pathway for biochar deployment: certified production, transparent monitoring, and practical applications that connect carbon removal with soil restoration and climate resilience.
The full scientific publication is available on this url
