Submission + - Crop nutrition down 3.2% in under 4 decades due to rising CO2 levels
GameboyRMH writes: It's a well-understood phenomenon that rising CO2 levels decrease crop nutrition, but now Futurism reports that Dutch researchers have tallied the recent damage: in a survey of 43 different crops, nutrients were found to have fallen an average of 3.2% since the late '80s. Higher CO2 levels cause crops to gain biomass faster without absorbing nutrients at an accelerated rate and with decreased water consumption, resulting in lower nutrient concentration. “The plant is becoming more efficient, but it’s occurring at a price, from a human perspective,” Lewis Ziska, a plant biologist at Columbia University who studied the phenomenon for more than two decades, told WaPo. Previous studies have estimated that by 2050, this effect could cause zinc deficiency to affect an additional 175 million people, protein deficiency to affect an additional 122 million, and could decrease iron uptake by 4% while 1.4 billion women of childbearing age and children under 5 already live in countries with anemia rates of over 20%.
