By Nneka Nwogwugwu
Some US scientists who founded a startup company, Living Carbon, have genetically modified a tree that can fight climate change.
The startup says it’s genetically modified hybrid poplar trees to grow faster so they’ll absorb more carbon dioxide and help minimize the damage of climate change.
Carbon dioxide has grown rapidly in the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, leading to extreme climate effects.
The startup says it edits the genes of the trees to speed up photosynthesis, the process that plants use to make food from carbon dioxide and water. This enables the trees to grow faster with the extra energy, according to the company.
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The startup, which was founded in 2019 and has raised $15 million, plans to generate revenue from sapling sales and carbon credits it receives for its gene-edited trees.
In one case, a tree it modified accumulated 53% more mass during five months of growth, according to a report Living Carbon published earlier this year.
Living Carbon says this translates to about 27% more carbon being captured. The findings are a proof-of-concept, so they will need to be proven to hold up over the long term of a tree’s life, and at a scale large enough to have a significant impact on the climate.
Living Carbon plans to plant about 4 million trees by 2023, and it has already done test plantings on abandoned mine lands. Living Carbon says if it doubles its existing acreage of planted trees every year, by 2030 it will have removed 604 million metric tons of carbon. That’s 1.66% of global emissions in a typical year, according to Living Carbon.
Living Carbon’s cofounders, Maddie Hall and Patrick Mellor, view gene-edited trees as a way not only capture carbon but also restore damaged land. Hall previously worked as an investor focused on climate change and biotechnology. She met Mellor at the Foresight Institute, a non-profit focused on technology, which he was involved with as he focused on climate stabilization.
“About 75% of land worldwide has been degraded due to human activity,” Hall told CNN Business. “How do we develop species that would be able to actually capture carbon on those pieces of land? You need biotechnology to do that.”
