The world is leading towards more accurate climate modelling, more equitable policymaking, and more sustainable food production thanks to the Imbalance-P project, with Josep Peñuelas, Michael Obersteiner, Ivan Janssens and Philippe Ciais.
Half of the world’s cropland could be used for other purposes if agricultural efficiency were improved through high-yield farming. That would mean making 576 million hectares of land available, more than 10 times the area of Spain (approximately 50 million hectares).
A study involving CREAF's Josep Peñuelas has identified the optimal temperatures of terrestrial plant ecosystems throughout the world and indicates the size of their margin for adaptation to warming. Outside that margin, ecosystem growth slows sharply.
A new study led by Josep Peñuelas and published in Nature Ecology and Evolution reveals that CO2 abundance in the atmosphere no longer has a powerful fertilizing effect on vegetation. The greening that has been observed in recent years is slowing and this will cause CO2 levels in the atmosphere to rise, thus increasing temperatures and leading to increasingly severe changes in climate.
According to the study in which CREAF participated, China contributes 43% of this amount. For decades it had been thought that human activities were responsible for only around 5% of atmospherically-circulating phosphorus. More phosphorus in the air means more phosphors deposited on the ground. This can boost plant growth and the capacity to sequester atmospheric CO2; for that reason human activities may be altering the phosphorus and carbon cycles to a degree which was previously unknown
The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, showed that forests growing in fertile soils with ample nutrients are able to sequester about 30% of the carbon that they take up during photosynthesis. In contrast, forests growing in nutrient-poor soils may retain only 6% of that carbon. The rest is returned to the atmosphere as respiration.
