Abstract
The long atmospheric residence time of CO2 creates an urgent need to add atmospheric carbon drawdown to CO2 regulatory strategies. Synthetic and systems biology (SSB), which enables manipulation of cellular phenotypes, offers a powerful approach to amplifying and adding new possibilities to current land management practices aimed at reducing atmospheric carbon. The participants (in attendance: Christina Agapakis, George Annas, Adam Arkin, George Church, Robert Cook-Deegan, Charles DeLisi, Dan Drell, Sheldon Glashow, Steve Hamburg, Henry Jacoby, Henry Kelly, Mark Kon, Todd Kuiken, Mary Lidstrom, Mike MacCracken, June Medford, Jerry Melillo, Ron Milo, Pilar Ossorio, Ari Patrinos, Keith Paustian, Kristala Jones Prather, Kent Redford, David Resnik, John Reilly, Richard J. Roberts, Daniel Segre, Susan Solomon, Elizabeth Strychalski, Chris Voigt, Dominic Woolf, Stan Wullschleger, and Xiaohan Yang) identified a range of possibilities by which SSB might help reduce greenhouse gas concentrations and which might also contribute to environmental sustainability and adaptation. These include, among other possibilities, engineering plants to convert CO2 produced by respiration into a stable carbonate, designing plants with an increased root-to-shoot ratio, and creating plants with the ability to self-fertilize. A number of serious ecological and societal challenges must, however, be confronted and resolved before any such application can be fully assessed, realized, and deployed.
Highlights
For nearly three decades after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, nations have tried to frame a global regime to control greenhouse gas emissions and to assist with adaptation, yet over this period, emissions have continued to increase
Carbon budget studies show that meeting these objectives will require reducing net greenhouse gas emissions virtually to zero from all sectors—including agriculture, land use, and construction, as well as energy—within a few decades, a daunting challenge [1]
The temperature objectives of the Paris Accord are not likely to meet the general objective of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is to stabilize “greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”
Summary
For nearly three decades after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, nations have tried to frame a global regime to control greenhouse gas emissions and to assist with adaptation, yet over this period, emissions have continued to increase. CO2 emission will, not stop immediately; the extent to which it continues, and the rate at which the postindustrial global average temperature increases, depends on the growth in the world’s future energy use and the types of energy utilized [5] and the management of agricultural land, all of which are unknown Given this situation, a number of new technologies have been proposed to remove CO2 from the atmosphere [6, 7], including biotic and abiotic methods [8]. (ii) The wide range in time scales that would be needed for proof-of-principle, scaling, and cost reductions depends on the application (iii) The economic cost-benefit of SSB, which could weigh heavily in favor of benefit as a consequence of substantial cobenefits, including less expensive, more effective crop growth; the ability to use degraded lands that are currently not sufficiently arable for the growth of crops and other useful plant products; the potential for discovery of plant-based pharmaceuticals or biomaterials; and, more generally, a boost in the growth of agrogenomic start-ups (iv) An emerging roadmap for future research, which includes an open and global assessment of serious ethical, social, legal, environmental, and scientific issues that must be resolved before SSB can be introduced as a climate control measure
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