Since the pioneering report of Kistler on silica aerogels, light-weight, porous and multifunctional aerogel materials have become staple building-blocks for advanced nanotechnologies. This enables tremendous implementations in various sectors including for instance insulating materials and aerospace devices. Surprisingly, biopolymer-based aerogels and specifically those driven from renewable resources were only sporadically reported, inspite of their promising opportunities. In fact, researches in this area were overwhelmingly dominated by the catalytic transformation of these macromolecules into fuels and platform chemicals. Quite recently, there is growing interest in using biopolymers directly to create functional materials. In this category, chitosan is on the rise due to the presence of amino groups on the polymer backbone that distinguishes it as a unique natural cationic polymer. Particularly, the ability of chitosan to form physical and chemical porous hydrogels and the efficacy of the supercritical drying method to stabilize the fibrillar dispersed network enable access to chitosan aerogels with macro-porous network and surface area up to 300 m2.g-1. This class of porous materials behaves as micro-reactors to host metallic particles and to stabilize growing clusters by the well-known sol-gel chemistry. This synthetic method affords plenty porous scaffolds including reactive organic-inorganic synergistic catalysts, entangled chitosan-clay composites6 and dispersed chitosan-metal nanoparticles.