NEW YORK, NY — As climate change continues to impact communities across the world, researchers are sounding the alarm about the threat to crops. The rise in temperature is directly affecting four staples – corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans – that make up 75% of the calories consumed by humans daily. But these key crops are integral to more than just the food supply – they are crucial to a little-known yet oft-touted ‘technofix’ called BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage), which now pulls approximately 1.5 million tonnes per year of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. BECCS features heavily in many countries’ climate plans. A new article in Nature provides compelling evidence that as global temperatures rise, crops will decline, resulting in reduced harvest. This will limit the efficiency of BECCS and when efficiency is reduced, BECCS technology is less effective at removing emissions from the atmosphere.

The article, Declining Crop Yields Limit the Potential of Bioenergy, finds that relying on crops to capture carbon dioxide to reduce carbon emissions is not a viable long-term solution if rising temperatures are killing crops rapidly. Gernot Wagner, climate economist at Columbia Business School, and co-author Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs Professor Wolfram Schlenker show that using biomass materials to reduce emissions does not have the positive outcome, because as crops decline due to rising temperatures, they will not be effective in creating energy and reducing carbon emissions.

Professor Wagner and his co-author find that if global mitigation alongside large-scale biomass for energy is delayed to 2060 when global warming exceeds about 2.5 °C, then the number of crops would be too low in reducing carbon emissions and unable to meet the Paris goal of even 2 °C by 2200. The findings reinforce the urgency of early mitigation, ideally by 2040. If nothing is done – no new technologies become available in the near future to compensate for the reduced capacity of biomass in reducing carbon emissions – the world will face irreversible damage and serious food insecurity

“We need to address the fact that rising temperatures will reduce key crops that are critical to BECCS,” said Professor Wagner. “We must stop politicizing solutions to reducing emissions, this is just another form of delaying the solutions we need now. It is time to look at this as a global issue affecting humanity. Further delay is not an option.”

The research evaluated the strength of using biomass to reduce carbon emissions by measuring the crop amounts to increases in growing-season temperature, atmospheric CO2 concentration and intensity of nitrogen fertilization. They found that rising temperatures would cause transformative changes in social–ecological systems by jeopardizing climate stability and threatening food security.

Crop decline needs rapid solutions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that continue to contribute to temperatures rise or by relocating crop fields on a mass scale. Current efforts to curb global warming are still increasingly relying on the use of crops such as corn and soy to create energy that is burned to create heat or converted into electricity, to reduce emissions. Until there are immediate solutions that will stop temperatures from rising, crops remain in danger of dying faster – endangering food security and hurting any attempts to meet essential climate goals.

To learn more about the cutting-edge research being conducted at Columbia Business School, please visit www.gsb.columbia.edu.

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