Carbon Capture: Mitigating Climate Change

To learn more about Climate Change, watch this video.

Study Rationale:

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues humanity faces in the coming century. Increasingly more attention is being given to climate change as a global issue that needs to be addressed by all sectors of society rather than leaving it up to the scientific community. As such, we’ve seen high-profile CEOs and activists like Bill Gates and Elon Musk beginning to take on a more active role in promoting social awareness about the reality of climate change.

What differentiates climate change as an issue that needs to be resolved urgently is the severity of the consequences we are expected to face should we fail to develop and implement viable solutions soon enough. Ranging from more severe and frequent natural disasters that threaten our shared environment to toxic levels of atmospheric smog causing disease conditions like asthma and heart disease, we cannot afford to take these potential consequences lightly. Rather, it will take a worldwide effort to successfully combat climate change and save our planet from decaying into an uninhabitable environment.

Study Impact and Next Steps:

Why is climate change not a simple fix? And what criteria would a potential solution have to meet in order to resolve a unique, global scale problem like climate change?

Climate change is extremely difficult to overcome at this time because of the damage already done. Our planet is warming due to the greenhouse effect, where an overabundance of greenhouse gases like CO2 present in the atmosphere causes too much heat to be trapped in the atmosphere than is safe for global temperatures. The safe upper limit for carbon concentration in the atmosphere is considered to be around 380 parts per million (ppm). The amount already in the atmosphere was measured at roughly 409 ppm in 2019, with an expected average increase of 2 ppm/year.

A potential solution would have to include both a way to reduce the amount of carbon emitted from the soil into the atmosphere and a way to displace the already dangerously high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Efforts to reduce emissions are absolutely necessary, yet they won’t be sufficient for properly dealing with the current levels. Humans must find a way to remove the excess carbon already causing damage in the atmosphere.
One of the possible mitigating strategies purported by scientists seeks to employ the natural phenomena of biosequestration. Biosequestration is the process where carbon is captured from the atmosphere by living organisms and transferred to the soil where it is stored. This process primarily occurs through organisms like plants and bacteria, which use natural processes such as photosynthesis and carbon fixation to convert atmospheric carbon into usable forms like sugars.

What means do we have for influencing and enhancing the drawdown and biosequestration processes? Can human intervention meaningfully impact the amount of carbon that’s naturally sequestered from atmosphere to soil by nature’s systems?

Some scientists have pointed to the potential use of microbes in facilitating these processes. Microbial organisms like bacteria and fungi have unique abilities that may confer suitability for use in the mitigation of climate change. For example, scientists are studying bacteria that increase the photosynthetic capacity of plants and could enhance drawdown by increasing the rate of photosynthesis. With higher rates of photosynthesis among plants, we can expect to see greater levels of carbon being converted from atmospheric CO2 to the usable energy form of sugar. Alternatively, carbon-fixing cyanobacteria may increase the amount of carbon sequestered by their natural activities in fixing atmospheric CO2 to use it in their own growth.

These specific examples illustrate just a few of the many potential uses microbes could have in helping mitigate climate change. The ongoing search for the most effective microbes and their uses could prove pivotal in the coming decades to successfully changing the trajectory of our planet’s condition. Indeed, the long-term survival of life on earth may depend on it.