Nature: Increasing CO2 levels can reduce crop nutrition

BioTong reports: For future farmers and eaters, this may be bad news: With the increase in CO2 levels in this century, the nutrition of some grains and beans will be much lower in the future than it is now

This new discovery was published online in the journal Nature on May 7, 2014

Researchers investigated multiple varieties of wheat, rice, peas, soybeans, corn, and sorghum.

The research team used a system called Free Air Concentration Enrichment (FACE) to simulate high levels of CO2 in open fields.

Experiments have shown that some of the most important crops in the world have decreased nutritional quality in response to increased CO2 concentrations

Andrew Leakey, a professor at the Institute of Plant Biology and Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois and the co-author of this article, pointed out: “When we conducted all the FACE experiments we had done around the world, we found that many of our key crops have lower levels of zinc and Iron concentration (under high CO2 conditions)

In wheat, rice, peas, and soybeans, zinc and iron content decreased significantly

Leakey pointed out: "In different environments in many countries, we have found that the nutritional quality of crops has declined

Leakey said that more research is needed to determine how crops grown in developing regions of the world respond to high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere

He said: "We started to conduct this experiment in a tropical climate with tropical soils.

Further reading: The UN Climate Change Report highlights the dangers of global warming