18 GMO - enhanced photosynthesis

Corbyn

Carbon-guzzling trees and crops, genetically altered to boost photosynthesis and store carbon in the roots, could absorb millions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere

There are projects under way around the world to genetically engineer plants – namely crops – for traits such as bigger yields, disease resistance or drought or heat tolerance. But efforts to engineer them to do better at drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere to fight the climate crisis directly are newer.

Living Carbon, founded in 2019 and which has received $36m in venture capital funding to date, is in the vanguard of establishing the technology in trees. Meanwhile, a handful of others, including two world-leading California-based scientific institutions, are tackling how it might be done in agricultural crops. Both the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego and the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) in Berkeley, a joint venture between the University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Francisco, have received large amounts of philanthropic funding.

The possible impact of this approach on global CO2 emissions is difficult to quantify – it depends on how significant the gains could be, and how widely it’s deployed. But its proponents are bullish that if scaled up it could make a significant contribution and buy the world some time.

It is by increasing the efficiency of photosynthesis – the process by which plants use light, water and CO2 to make sugars that fuel plant growth (with oxygen as the byproduct) – that Living Carbon’s trees are able to capture more CO2 than they naturally would.

In a scientific paper published this April, the company reports that in a four-month-long greenhouse trial its modified poplars increased in biomass by 35-53% over its controls, equivalent to removing 17-27% more CO2 from the air.

It has been found, for example, that trees now growing in warmer conditions because of climate change grow faster because they suck up more CO2 anyway – though the trade-off is that they might die sooner.

Corbyn (2023) Could superpowered plants be the heroes of the climate crisis?