By Vijay Jayaraj
Scientific advancement and agricultural technology have revolutionized food production, enabling humanity to feed more readily a ballooning population. And working behind these celebrated innovations is an unacknowledged but indispensable contributor to the world’s growing food security: rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2).
The very molecule that has been wrongly branded as a doomsday gas has been contributing to increasing yields for essential crops like rice, wheat and soybeans.
Food Security is Serious Business
The 20th century’s Green Revolution demonstrated how scientific intervention – including the use of fertilizers – could dramatically boost crop yields. The late 1960s saw a huge turnaround in yields across the globe, thanks to Norman Borlaug’s high-yielding, drought-adaptive, disease-resistant varieties of food crops.
Nations that had suffered severe poverty and famine became agricultural giants within a decade or so. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, two nations that were once pleading for international aid to rescue their people from malnourishment and starvation.
Despite being criticized by some, agricultural advancements in the use of fertilizers, pesticides and gene editing have been vital. Without them, feeding our growing global population would be impossible. But they’re not the complete story.
Also driving higher crop yields has been an increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere that began in the 19th century as the Industrial Revolution accelerated. The rate of increase rose further with global industrialization following World War II.
C3-C4 Divide: Understanding the Difference
Having an especially efficient photosynthetic pathway are C4 plants, which have a four-carbon sugar molecule produced during photosynthesis. These plants, which include corn and sugarcane, have an evolutionary adaptation from millions of years ago that was a response to an atmosphere relatively low in CO2. Thus, C4 crops are already operating near peak efficiency when it comes to CO2 utilization under suitable environmental conditions like that of the present era.
In contrast, C3 plants that developed during a time in the distant past when CO2 levels where many times higher than today’s show dramatic responses to increased atmospheric levels of the gas. C3 plants, named for their three-carbon sugar molecule, have a relatively inefficient photosynthetic process. Their stomata – tiny pores on leaves that allow gaseous exchange – must remain open longer to capture sufficient CO2, which leads to greater water loss through transpiration.
Higher ambient CO2 levels allow C3 plants to photosynthesize more efficiently while losing less water. The benefits of elevated CO2 aren’t merely theoretical, as proven in field studies that have confirmed laboratory findings.
These studies, conducted in real-world conditions, show consistent yield increases across various C3 crops. Wheat yields increase by 20-30% under elevated CO2 conditions, while rice shows increases of between 15-32%. Soybeans, another crucial C3 crop, exhibit yield increases of up to 46% in some studies.
Perhaps nowhere is the CO2 effect more evident than in greenhouse cultivation. Modern greenhouse operators routinely boost productivity by elevating CO2 levels to 800-1,000 parts per million (ppm), which are well above current atmospheric levels of around 420 ppm. The results are striking: tomato yields increase by 40-50%, cucumber production rises by 30-40%, and growth of lettuce and other vegetables accelerates significantly.
In addition, it has now come to light that even C4 crops – like corn and sugarcane – can benefit from elevated CO2 under conditions of drought and low soil nitrogen. This is big revelation for tropical Asian countries where sugarcane farmers often struggle with insufficient water for their plants. Further research could reveal that the 21st century’s elevated CO2 levels have been aiding crop production there.
Understanding CO2‘s role in crop productivity should inform the policy landscape, where governments and corporate entities like Blackrock and Vanguard have incorrectly promoted the reduction of atmospheric CO2 as a “life-saving” endeavor without understanding basic plant biology. The opposite is true: More atmospheric CO2 is a boon to humanity, and less is bad.
We should be grateful for the industrial emissions of carbon dioxide that contribute to greater crop productivity instead of spending billions on foolish projects to remove the gas from the air to store it underground. Such initiatives will do nothing to improve the weather while impoverishing people.
Today’s release of carbon dioxide through the combustion of coal, oil and natural gas is reversing a process that sequestered CO2 from the atmosphere millions of years and lowered to less than optimum concentrations the amount of the gas available for plant growth.
A resolution worth adopting this New Year would be to reject the coordinated demonization of CO2 by climate scaremongers and to celebrate it for what it is: the gas of life.
This commentary was first published at BizPac Review on December 27, 2024.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
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