Availability of Vital Renewable Energy Source at Risk From Climate Change



According to new research, climate change is endangering the supply of biomass fuels and technology, a crucial replacement for fossil fuels.

According to a recent study, as temperatures rise due to climate change, the window of opportunity to maximize the use of biomass from plants, wood, and garbage as a renewable energy source and a substitute for petrochemicals is shrinking.

According to the researchers, if immediate action is not done to switch from fossil fuels to bioenergy and other renewables, climate change will lower crop yields, lowering the supply of biomass feedstocks. Additionally, they assert that decreasing food production is likely to encourage the growth of farmland, raising greenhouse gas emissions from land use change and speeding up climate change even more.

"Biomass fuels and feedstocks offer a renewable source of energy and a viable alternative to petrochemicals, but the results of our study act as a stark warning about how climate change will put their availability at risk if we continue to allow global temperatures to rise," said co-author of the paper Professor James Clark from the University of York Department of Chemistry.

There is a tipping point where our ability to mitigate against climate change's worst effects will be substantially hampered. If we want to take full use of biomass with carbon capture and storage, including the production of bio-based compounds, we must use it today.

The importance of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been emphasized in numerous assessments of climate mitigation, including the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as a key component of the plan for achieving the 2 or 1.5 °C warming target outlined in the Paris Agreement.

The effects of increasing average temperatures, nitrogen fertilization intensity, atmospheric CO2 concentration, and precipitation on crop yields were modelled by the researchers using data from throughout the world. They found that if the transition to BECCS is put off until the second half of this century, climate change will significantly diminish biomass production. As a result, the 2 °C objective would not be met, endangering global food security.

For instance, the scientists discovered that if BECCS is put off until 2060 rather than 2040, lower agricultural residue yields for biomass technologies would reduce BECCS's capacity and increase global warming by 1.7 to 3.7 °C by 2200, along with a decrease in the average daily crop calories per person worldwide from 2.1 million to 1.5 million.

According to the experts, in order to prevent serious food shortages in many of the poor world regions most severely impacted by climate change, the size of the food trade in this scenario would need to expand by 80% from 2019 levels.

Professor Clark continued, "There is yet hope that we may ameliorate global warming and a worldwide food problem if negative-carbon mitigation technology reliant on biomass could be broadly deployed in the short term."

By UNIVERSITY OF YORK 

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