Why the International and US Biochar Initiatives Came Back to CTRS for Their 2025 Global Market Report
A case study of CTRS Market Intelligence's work with the International Biochar Initiative (IBI), the US Biochar Initiative (USBI), and the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford on the 2025 Global Biochar Market Report.
The Situation
The International Biochar Initiative (IBI) and the US Biochar Initiative (USBI) are the two organizations that anchor the global biochar industry. Between them, they speak for the producers, equipment manufacturers, distributors, and carbon market participants who are scaling one of the more credible pathways to durable carbon dioxide removal. Their data is cited by carbon market regulators, government funders, and private capital. That data has to hold up to scrutiny.
Every two years, IBI and USBI commission a joint global stakeholder survey that serves as the industry baseline. The 2023 wave had produced useful data, but by late 2024 the market had already changed. The partners needed fresh data, a published global market report, and a partner who could deliver both inside a real nonprofit budget. The strategic constraint was credibility. Whatever came out of the 2025 work would be cited for years, and any methodological softness would be visible.
CTRS had worked on the 2023 survey as a sub-contractor to another firm. When IBI and USBI began planning the 2025 wave, they reached out to CTRS directly. The 2023 work had been good, the analysis had held up, and they wanted the people who had built the data. That decision is the starting point for this case study.
The Challenge
CTRS scoped the work into two phases. Phase 1 covered survey design, multi-language translation (English, Chinese, and Spanish), fielding, and verbatim coding of open-ended responses. Phase 2 covered the analytic work that turns a clean dataset into a published report: data exploration, year-over-year comparison against the 2023 baseline, chart development, and editorial support on the final document. The final dataset captured more than 930 responses across six continents and 50 countries.
The way CTRS structured the commercial side mattered as much as the methodology. CTRS scoped Phase 2 to fit the combined budget IBI and USBI had available. CTRS was also able to juggle unique procurement rules and delays, starting work right away knowing that the timing of everything was important. That is not a posture every firm takes, and it is the kind of thing a client remembers.
The methodological decisions in Phase 2 mattered to the partners for one reason in particular: the report had to withstand external scrutiny. The 2023 figures in the 2025 dataset were not the results that had been published in 2023. In 2023, we were asking respondents to estimate how much they would produce that year. The 2025 dataset saw respondents retroactively disclosing what they had actually produced two years earlier.
That is normal in industries without mandatory reporting, but it changes what a year-over-year comparison can claim. CTRS recommended surfacing that transparency directly in the executive summary rather than burying it in a methodology footnote. The same logic applied to the 2027 and 2030 figures. These were producer self-projections, not econometric forecasts, and the report needed to say so.
The work also required tight coordination with Dr. Kirsty Harrington at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford, who was responsible for the durable carbon dioxide removal calculations that anchored the report's climate impact figures. The headline biochar story is the carbon sequestration potential, and getting those calculations right required reconciling production data with biomass-specific carbon content assumptions that varied by feedstock.
CTRS worked alongside the Oxford team to align the survey data with the methodology Kirsty was developing, so the production numbers and the CDR numbers in the final report told the same story.
What Changed
Both partners are publishing a 2025 Global Biochar Market Report as their primary external reference on the industry, joining the 2023 report already hosted on their websites. USBI is using the US-specific cut of the same dataset to build out its own policy and member communications work, with USBI's Director of Agricultural Markets driving further analysis off the producer-level data. The figures from this work are now the numbers all three organizations cite, the figures their carbon market partners reference, and the baseline the next wave of the survey will be measured against.
The relationship has continued past the original engagement. After the initial reports shipped, IBI and USBI both commissioned additional post-survey support work that ran through May 2026 to handle further dataset queries, edits, and follow-on analysis. The 2025 work has positioned CTRS as the analytic partner for the next wave of the survey, and the working relationships between the IBI team, the USBI team, and CTRS have settled into the kind of low-friction collaboration that does not need to be renegotiated every time a new question comes up.
The harder outcome to quantify is reputational. IBI and USBI have a defensible 2025 global market report under their own brands. The numbers are theirs, the framing is theirs, and the report stands up to the kind of scrutiny that comes when a sector is trying to win credibility in carbon markets and climate policy. That is what they paid for.
The Result
The choice of research partner is rarely a procurement decision. It is more often a credibility decision. The data and the methodology will be cited by people who were not in the room when the work was scoped, and they will be cited for years. The most useful thing a research partner can do is push back on the small instincts to overstate, smooth, or round up. Those instincts are how market reports lose their authority. The discipline of writing down what the data actually says, with its limits stated openly, is what turns a survey into a reference document an industry can rely on.
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Engagement period: 2025 survey design and fielding (Phase 1) through mid-2026 final report and post-publication support (Phase 2). CTRS team: Aaron Cruikshank (President), Abhishek Upadhyay (Research Director). Published with the permission of the International Biochar Initiative, the US Biochar Initiative, and the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford.