Genetically enhanced crops could help fight climate change

Crops with genetically enhanced root systems could potentially help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The idea seems simple: grow crops with bigger roots that can store more carbon dioxide under the soil.

But can this actually help with the fight against climate change? A new study says yes – but with some caveats.

In a new report from researchers at the University of California San Diego, scientists explain how genetically enhanced crops with larger root systems could become a practical way to remove large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The researchers, based at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the School of Global Policy and Strategy, also explored how this method compares to other carbon removal strategies.

Why we need rapid carbon removal

According to estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world must remove between five and 16 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year to have a shot at keeping the climate stable. That’s in addition to reducing how much we emit in the first place.

If we don’t act fast, the world could see widespread disasters, including severe storms, failing crops, worsening disease outbreaks and flooding due to rising sea levels.

So far, however, there hasn’t been much research on how fast carbon removal methods could realistically scale up in the real world and help to bring the climate back into balance.

A closer look at carbon-enhanced crops

That’s where carbon-enhanced crops come in. These genetically modified plants have larger root systems designed to store more carbon in the soil.

The researchers ran a detailed analysis of how much carbon these crops could help remove if widely adopted. They found that, within a period of 13 years of rollout, these crops could remove between 0.9 and 1.2 gigatons of CO₂ annually.

That’s about seven times the total amount of carbon offsets that are currently supplied to the global market.

“There is a consensus in the scientific community that we will have to scale CDR [carbon dioxide removal] substantially to reach net zero – on top of drastically reducing our greenhouse gas emissions,” said lead author Daniela Faggiani-Dias.

“Yet, research on how CDR can realistically scale – considering not only technical limits, but also scale-up speed and feasible pathways – is very thin. And this is what is new about our study.”

“We provide a detailed analysis of the CDR scaling challenge and propose a framework to estimate how quickly and to what extent emerging, highly uncertain technologies might scale.

According to Faggiani-Dias, even though the analysis focuses on carbon-enhanced crops, the framework is generalizable across CDR approaches and helps to surface key uncertainties in scale-up potential.

Learning from past technological advances

The team looked to the past to understand how fast new technologies typically spread. They studied how other agricultural advances – like hybrids, pesticides, fertilizers, and crop rotation – caught on over time.

One of the most relevant comparisons was with genetic modification. Like carbon-enhanced crops, genetically modified crops promised benefits to farmers and the agricultural supply chain. But the rollout wasn’t smooth.

In countries that allowed genetically modified crops, it took about 11 years to go from early adoption to widespread use. Even then, only 13% of the world’s farmland currently grows these types of crops. Regulations and public concerns have slowed wider acceptance.

The researchers say carbon-enhanced crops could face the same hurdles unless there are strong incentives, such as carbon credits, for countries that use them.

Why crops may be the fastest fix

Compared to other carbon removal strategies – such as storing carbon in rock or filtering it from air or oceans – enhanced crops have a head start. They can be adopted using existing farm infrastructure and technologies.

Farmers are already familiar with trying new crop techniques, and there’s a built-in industry ready to support new seed technologies. Plus, the soil is often depleted of carbon, making it a good place to store more.

Other strategies would potentially require the establishment of entirely new industries before they could be successfully implemented at scale. This could take years to test and verify, considering that some of these strategies are still in their infancy.

That’s why crops with enhanced roots are seen as one of the fastest and most realistic tools for carbon removal – although they would still not be effective enough on their own.

Crops are only part of the solution

Faggiani-Dias emphasized that this approach is just one piece of the climate solution puzzle. She noted that the benefit of carbon-enhanced crops could be significant, but not enough on its own.

According to Faggiani-Dias, these efforts should be seen as just one component of a broader strategy to decarbonize the global economy.

The full study was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

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