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As the climate crisis rages on, it’s going to threaten our ability to grow food crops.
More than that, it could interfere with a proposed
high-tech solution for capturing and storing carbon.
Since the late ‘90s, researchers have explored using plant material to that end.
But… we might want to get started pretty soon.
An analysis published this week in the journal Nature warns that relying on crops
to capture carbon might not work as well if we wait until after 2050 to do it.
The method, called large-scale bioenergy with carbon capture and storage
or BECCS, involves burning plant biomass to create energy.
Plant matter is burned to release carbon dioxide,
which can be captured and permanently stored.
Now, BECCS has some drawbacks, like the amount of water, land, and fertilizer
it would use, but using agricultural waste from food crops like corn and rice
instead of purpose-grown plants can help avoid that.
And because it has the potential to capture quite a lot of carbon,
it’s been kind of an ace up policymakers’ sleeves.
The plan for BECCS has been to use it later,
when the technology that makes it possible is more efficient and advanced.
It would be a safeguard, for when we really
need to start sucking CO2 out of the air.
But it turns out procrastinating might be a bad idea.
In the new analysis, the researchers suggest that
waiting to deploy BECCS could actually make it less effective.
Because the warming that happens between now and then
could make it a lot harder to grow crops.
To show this, the researchers modeled how crop yields will be different in the future
depending on when we get really serious about mitigating the climate crisis.
They looked at things like higher growing temperatures,
more available CO2 in the atmosphere, and changes in the nitrogen supply.
Then they modeled how those factors would affect the growth of crops like wheat,
corn, and soybeans depending on when we
started deploying BECCS and other large scale options.
The potential “whens” included every decade between 2030 and 2100.
And they found that delaying the implementation of BECCS from just 2040 to 2060
could substantially limit its ability to help fight climate change.
This is especially true if we pass the researchers’
projected tipping point of 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming in 2050.
That’s because it will be harder to grow crops at that point,
which means both food shortages and less biomass
available to use for carbon capture.
Unless we clear substantially more land to do it,
which comes with its own problems.
And capturing less carbon with BECCS could lead to additional warming.
Which means more bad news for agriculture.
It could kick off a feedback loop that again results in
less carbon capture and less food on the table.
And the shortages could be especially apparent in areas of the world
closer to the equator that are already scheduled to feel the
effects of climate change before everyone else.
Now, BECCS isn’t the worst idea!
Despite its limitations, it could work.
But the authors of the paper are clear that there are some pretty
serious drawbacks to assuming it’s a get out of jail free card for later this century,
when we’ve failed to decarbonize quickly enough to meet our goals.
Instead, it’s one tool among many to put in our toolkit.
And we should do it sooner rather than later,
if we want to get serious about stopping the climate crisis.
Which brings us to another potential tool: compost.
It’s satisfying to toss food scraps in a bucket and know they’ll
meet a better end than they would’ve in a landfill.
But unless you compost yourself or use a community compost service,
it’s hard to know exactly what becomes of it.
And because industrial compost is produced from so many different waste products
in so many different ways, it’s kind of like a
mystery-flavored lollipop of soil enhancers.
It’s hard to know what you’re going to get,
and whether it’s going to be the flavor that you actually wanted.
The good news is that researchers publishing this week in Nature Food have
some ideas for how to make composting better.
They find that matching compost’s composition to the soil, crop,
and region where it will be used, and supplementing it with
additional nutrients as needed, could boost the worldwide annual production
of key cereal crops by about 4%, which is a cool 96 million tonnes.
Previous studies of compost have generally looked at
how much of it we need to improve crop yield.
But the researchers in this study wondered what would happen if we
matched the characteristics of the compost to the nutrient needs of
the particular region, soil, and crop where the compost would be used.
To find out, they first crunched the numbers using 2,000 observations
around the world of how compost currently helps agricultural output.
And they confirmed that, unfortunately, the worldwide effects of compost use
on cropland are wildly variable and pretty underwhelming.
So they asked what would happen if instead,
you created and supplied composts with optimal nutrients for a particular region,
soil, crop, and application method.
They called this precision compost strategy.
And they tried to make their projections technologically feasible.
They found that not only did their approach boost crop yields,
it also had the ability to help combat climate change.
By increasing the value and importance of compost, the strategy could divert a lot
of organic waste from landfills and sequester the carbon in it back into topsoil.
At the end of the day, industrial composting has become a pretty popular
and accessible solution, so it’s reassuring to think that this idea
might help make it a more effective one.
Now, in case you’re wondering whether composting will make BECCS
more effective… well, these were two separate studies, so we can’t really say.
But both of them do show that we’ll have to think about how to produce food
in the coming century, especially for the most vulnerable communities.
Whether the solutions are something high-tech, good old-fashioned dirt…
or a little bit of both.
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