Edition 04: Carrying the Weight of Delivery

Biochar has emerged as the leading pathway for scalable, cost-effective carbon removal. Demand for durable carbon removal is outpacing credible supply. High-quality biochar capacity is being contracted as fast as it comes online, driving market value upward. 

Simultaneously, the industry is maturing through rigour. Digital-native registries like Puro.earth and Isometric are setting new benchmarks for speed & transparency, while standards around additionality and biomass sourcing have narrowed to ensure multi-century permanence. Financing is also keeping pace with this shift. Through long-term offtake agreements and innovative capital structures, we are seeing the creation of truly bankable pathways for global growth.

This edition of Between the Scales reflects our strategic focus. We are prepared to step into the new year with a deliberation and durability that exceeds the last year.

As Equilibrium enters Q1 2026, the question is no longer whether individual parts of our system work in isolation, but whether they hold together when farmer incentives, regulatory interpretation, and financial engines act on the same system at once.

Research is now tested against field variability, not just explanatory strength. Field programs are judged not only by uptake, but by whether they remain legible to verification. Technology is built less to scale activity, and more to preserve interpretability as activity grows. Finance, in turn, is structured around what the system can reliably deliver, not what can be projected.

The ability to create lasting impact for communities remains central, but our capacity to measure and evaluate that impact is what we are building out in Q1.

Engineered Removals: Biochar Moves into Delivery

Over the past year, we blended our industrial biochar production thesis with an artisanal, decentralised model — shaped by repeated field observations across Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Rajasthan. The artisanal model was leveraged to enhance feedstock quality, production control, and community involvement in the process. 

Smallholders and local workers are no longer managing residue as waste, but as a paid input into a climate asset. Progress over 2025 included:

• Commissioning multiple decentralised biochar facilities, operating closer to feedstock sources and under tighter production oversight
• Advancing one facility through Isometric validation, moving from production readiness toward issuance credibility
• Clearing Puro pre-eligibility at another site, converting installed capacity into issuance-ready infrastructure

This discipline came through in December 2025, when improved performance across our Kon-Tiki kilns enabled the production of ~1000 tonnes of biochar. As we enter Q1, the focus is on turning early yield responses into more predictable income pathways for farmers, while tightening consistency across the network. 

Each batch moves through a visible chain — handled by trained operators from the community, produced on their farms itself, and returned to nearby fields. What distinguishes our operations is that every cycle remains traceable, rather than collapsed into aggregates.

The focus in Q1 is on reducing variability in feedstock sourcing, stabilising production yields, and strengthening real-time monitoring — so that delivery becomes increasingly precise. 

Nature-Based Solutions: Designing for Long Time Horizons

The shift made in 2025, from design to science-led execution, now anchors our Nature Based Solutions work. In Q1, the focus sharpens to endurance: how restoration holds across 30,000+ hectares of forests, grasslands, and coastal ecosystems as early interventions give way to long timelines. 

Where we work are landscapes shaped by forest-dependent and tribal communities, local institutions, and by ecological processes that rarely move linearly. This reality functions as a natural guideline that shapes pacing, sequencing, and the kinds of claims that can be made responsibly.

Our agroforestry and mangrove projects progressing under Verra (VCS IDs 5589, 5697, 5805) continue to anchor a long-term carbon removal pipeline of roughly 20 million tonnes.  Each project has been structured with multi-decade delivery, monitoring, and governance in mind — from KML lock-ins and Gram Panchayat resolutions to validation timelines that stretch decades, not quarters. 

Much of this work is led through local collectives, particularly women’s groups, where restoration and livelihoods are inseparable. Skills, continuity, and ecological gains are built into routine agricultural cycles to carry the work forward. 

The work in the Sundarbans offers an early reference point for what comes next — prioritising depth of delivery over surface expansion, and using field-tested realities to guide where solutions are introduced.

None of this progress happens without our builders. Our team grew from 6 to 50, with recent months bringing new field executives, monitoring officers, and research associates across biochar, NBS, and carbon projects. Lab and data-validation capacity solidified field-to-verification pipelines.

Technical and financial muscle has bulked up too: new GIS, carbon analytics, and asset development capacity tightened scoping, baselines, and monitoring. Scaled functions in partnerships, business development, finance, HR, and operations with added carbon finance expertise were also introduced to handle complex structures at pace. 

A Day of Togetherness

Before the year closed, the team took a day to slow down, away from timelines and decision threads.

We took time to acknowledge those who lead silently, those who move between roles with ease, and the many ways the team has absorbed complexity as the organisation grew.

Conversations drifted between reflection and laughter, and the evening gave way to board games and a level of jovial competitiveness. Along the way, we discovered unexpected talents, from trivia recall to an encyclopedic command of Bollywood lore — reminders that teams are always more dimensional than their job descriptions.

The new quarter arrived with the jingle of shared laughter and a renewed sense of purpose.

Equilibrium enters 2026 having narrowed its aperture deliberately. 

Fewer claims, carried further. Fewer assumptions, tested harder. Fewer shortcuts, even when they are available. 

This is not a posture of caution; it is a commitment to continuity. To build projects that remain coherent when conditions shift, when scrutiny intensifies, and when early momentum gives way to long timelines.

The work ahead is less about announcing what is possible and more about standing by what is provable, season after season, audit after audit.