Horizon 1 1 17 ACL : Articles dans des revues avec comité de lecture répertoriées par l'AERES Pedosphere 295-298 2025 fdi:010092792 ENG Pedosphere 1002-0160 ISI:001422503800001 1 10.1016/j.pedsph.2024.10.009 https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010092792 https://www.documentation.ird.fr/intranet/publi/2025-04/010092792.pdf 35 Horizon (IRD) Biochar application to soil is commonly recognized to improve soil fertility and consequently biomass and food production sustainably. We re-examined the robustness of the underlying data and found that, of the 12 000+ publications on "biochar and agriculture" used in meta-studies, only 109 Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) papers (or 0.9%) provide experimental data on the impacts on crop yield and/or biomass production. Our analysis revealed that none (0%) of these studies compared a biochar treatment to a treatment adding to the soil the same amounts of easily accessible nutrients as found in biochar, 0.9% evaluated the toxicity of biochar, and 5.5% considered at least two cropping cycles after a single biochar application, which in all cases are major shortcomings. Finally, when computed only for agricultural soils (n = 65), the mean biomass or grain yield gain, which was 16.1% (median at 7.1%) for all available experiments, decreased to -0.64% (median at 5.2%). Consequently, the underlying evidence base to support biochar application in agricultural soils to enhance biomass production and grain yield is so far limited. 068 ; 076 UR182 Inde / Afrique du Sud