As temperatures continue to rise around the world, we are losing our ability to make the best use of agricultural biomass as a renewable energy source, scientists say.
Unless we step up our efforts to adopt bioenergy and other renewables in favor of fossil fuels, we will miss our best opportunity to do so on a large scale, as climate change is expected to decrease crop yields, thus reducing the availability of biomass raw materials, according to an international team of researchers from the University of York in the UK and the University of Funan in China.
Reductions in food production due to climate change will also lead to the expansion of agricultural land, further increasing greenhouse gas emissions from land use, aggravating climate change.
The researchers came to this conclusion after modeling how rising temperatures, atmospheric CO2 concentration, the intensity of nitrogen fertilization and rainfall would affect crop yields around the world. They found that if the shift to bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is delayed until the second half of the century, biomass production would be greatly reduced by climate change.
Biomass worries scientists
Climate scientists emphasized the importance of increasing BECCS around the world to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius. However, if BECCS is postponed from 2040 to 2060, reducing agricultural waste production for biomass technologies would decrease its capacity, indicates the new search .
As a result, global warming would increase from 1.7 degrees Celsius to 3.7 degrees Celsius by the year 2200, while the global average daily calories per capita from crops would decrease from 2.1 million calories to 1.5 million calories. .
In that scenario, the scale of food production would have to increase by 80% from 2019 levels to avoid severe shortages in many parts of the developing world, which will be hardest hit by climate change.
“Biomass fuels and feedstocks offer a renewable energy source and a viable alternative to petrochemicals, but the results of our study serve as a stern warning about how climate change will put their availability at risk if we continue to allow them to increase. global temperatures”. explains Professor James Clark, a scientist in the Department of Chemistry at the University of York and co-author of the study.
Close to the tipping point
“There is an inflection point where climate change will severely impede our ability to mitigate its worst effects,” adds Clarks. “Biomas with carbon capture and storage, including biobased chemical manufacturing, must be used now if we are to maximize its advantage.”
However, we still have the opportunity to act to prevent overheating and the resulting food shortages.
“If biomass-dependent carbon-negative mitigation technologies can be widely implemented in the short term, there is still hope that we can alleviate global warming and a global food crisis,” emphasizes Clark.
For Times of Sustainability. Article in English