Global Plant Growth is Not Keeping Up with CO2 Emissions to Reduce Gases

It turns out that global plant growth is not keeping up with the amount of atmospheric CO2 being released in the air. While plant growth is supposed to increase with increased CO2 emissions, it turns out that plants just can't keep pace.

In this latest study, the researchers looked at plant growth over time and compared it to CO2 emissions. It appears as if global plant growth has, in fact, increased over the past 30 years. However, it hasn't increased as much as expected given the change in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. In fact, models of plant responses to increasing CO2 and estimates of plants' ability to offset this increase may be unrealistically optimistic.

"Current Earth system models assume that global plant growth will provide the tremendous benefit of offsetting a significant portion of humanity's CO2 emissions, thus buying us much needed time to curb emissions," said William Kolby Smith, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Unfortunately, our observation-based estimates of global vegetation growth indicate that plant growth may not buy us as much time as expected, [so] action to curb emissions is all the more urgent."

There are two important factors that could be behind the results. It could be down to the availability of water and availability of nutrients. Warmer climate conditions could be increasing plant water stress, counteracting any positive effect of CO2. The other reason could be that there is limited availability of nitrogen and phosphorus in the environment.

The findings reveal that the past climate models don't accurately predict future plant growth. This, in particular, is important to note when setting limits on gas emissions.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

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