This declining trend will continue as long as the phenomenon does

Apr 8, 2014 14:28 GMT  ·  By

Scientists at the University of California in Davis (UCD) have determined in a new study that the quality of food crops will continuously decline as global warming intensifies. The more time passes before climate change is addressed, the poorer our foods will get. This is the first time these conclusions were verified in a field test, investigators say. 

This effect largely occurs because elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere do not allow plants to assimilate as much nitrate as they would like to into proteins. As a direct consequence, the nutritional value of crops from wheat to rice and corn continuously drops as more CO2 is emitted. Details of the research appear in the April 6 issue of the top journal Nature Climate Change.

“Food quality is declining under the rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide that we are experiencing. Several explanations for this decline have been put forward, but this is the first study to demonstrate that elevated carbon dioxide inhibits the conversion of nitrate into protein in a field-grown crop,” says UCD Department of Plant Sciences expert and lead study author Arnold Bloom.

He explains that plants absolutely need this ability to use nitrogen for protein productions. The effects of dropping nutrition in wheat, for example, would be catastrophic, since a quarter of all humans on Earth rely on this plant as their staple food. A similar situation can be found for rice, which sustains the vast majority of Asian countries, Science Daily reports.