Land ecosystems currently play a key role in mitigating climate change. The more carbon dioxide (CO2) plants and trees absorb during photosynthesis, the process they use to make food, the less CO2 remains trapped in the atmosphere where it can cause temperatures to rise. But scientists have identified an unsettling trend – as levels of CO2 in the atmosphere increase, 86 percent of land ecosystems globally are becoming progressively less efficient at absorbing it.
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Because CO2 is a main ‘ingredient’ that plants need to grow, elevated concentrations of it cause an increase in photosynthesis, and consequently, plant growth – a phenomenon aptly referred to as the CO2 fertilization effect, or CFE. CFE is considered a key factor in the response of vegetation to rising atmospheric CO2 as well as an important mechanism for removing this potent greenhouse gas from our atmosphere – but that may be changing.
For a new study published Dec. 10 in Science, researchers analyzed multiple field, satellite-derived and model-based datasets to better understand what effect increasing levels of CO2 may be having on CFE. Their findings have important implications for the role plants can be expected to play in offsetting climate change in the years to come.
since 1982, the global average CFE has decreased steadily from 21 percent to 12 percent per 100 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. In other words, terrestrial ecosystems are becoming less reliable as a temporary climate change mitigator.
What’s Causing It?
while an abundance of CO2 won’t limit growth, a lack of water, nutrients, or sunlight – the other necessary components of photosynthesis — will. To determine why the CFE has been decreasing, the study team took the availability of these other elements into account.
there’s both a moisture limitation as well as a nutrient limitation coming into play. In the tropics, there’s often just not enough nitrogen or phosphorus, to sustain photosynthesis, and in the high-latitude temperate and boreal regions, soil moisture is now more limiting than air temperature because of recent warming.
In effect, climate change is weakening plants’ ability to mitigate further climate change over large areas of the planet.
Next Steps
The international science team found that when remote-sensing observations were taken into account – including vegetation index data from NASA’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments – the decline in CFE is more substantial than current land-surface models have shown.
to avoid 1.5 or 2°C warming and the associated climate impacts, we need to adjust the remaining carbon budget to account for the weakening of the plant CO2 Fertilization Effect. And because of this weakening, land ecosystems will not be as reliable for climate mitigation in the coming decades.
— source nasa.gov | Dec 18, 2020