The study says that as global temperatures rise, there is less time to make the most of biomass, which is made from plants, wood, and waste. Biomass is a renewable energy source and a replacement for petrochemicals.
Scientists from Universities of York and Fudan University in China worked on the study, which was published in Nature. It looked at how sustainable biomass exploitation is. The researchers discovered that climate change will reduce crop yields, reducing the availability of biomass feedstocks if urgent action is not taken to reduce fossil fuels in favor of bioenergy and other renewables. Researchers say that reducing food production is also likely to lead to more cropland expansion, which increases greenhouse gas emissions from changing how land is used and speeds up climate change.
“Biomass fuels and feedstocks offer a renewable source of energy and a viable alternative to petrochemicals, but the results of our study act as a stark warning about how climate change will put their availability at risk if we continue to allow global temperatures to rise,” said co-author of the paper, Professor James Clark from the Department of Chemistry.
There is a tipping point where our ability to mitigate against climate change’s worst effects will be severely hampered. If we want to take full advantage of biomass with carbon capture and storage, including the production of bio-based chemicals, we must use it now.
In the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and in many assessments of climate mitigation, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been emphasized as a key component of the strategy for meeting the target of 2 °C or 1.5 °C warming set out in the Paris Agreement.
The effects of increasing average temperatures, atmospheric CO2 concentration, nitrogen fertilization intensity, and precipitation on crop yields were modeled by the researchers using global data. They discovered that if the transition to BECCS is put off until the second half of this century, climate change will significantly reduce biomass production, making it impossible to stay below 2°C and jeopardizing global food security.
For instance, the researchers found that delaying BECCS from 2040 to 2060 would result in lower agricultural residue yields for biomass technologies, which would reduce BECCS’s capacity and result in an increase in global warming of 1.7 to 3.7 °C by 2200, as well as a decrease in the average daily crop calories per person worldwide from 2.1 million to 1.5 million.
Researchers say that the size of the food trade in this scenario would need to grow by 80% from 2019 levels to prevent severe food shortages in many of the parts of the developing world that are most affected by climate change.
Professor Clark said, “There is still hope that we can stop global warming and a global food crisis if negative-carbon mitigation technologies based on biomass could be widely used in the near future.”
An international group of scientists from the UK, China, and Spain conducted this study.
