New research suggests that as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rise, some food becomes less nutritious.

The Southwestern University in Texas gathered data from over 200 experiments carried out by other scientists and discovered that the increasing carbon dioxide levels could cause key food crops to have a lower nutritional value than before.

All the experiments concentrated on the effects of higher levels of carbon dioxide on the proteins in crops such as barley, rice, wheat, soya bean and potatoes. The analysis showed that with raised levels of carbon dioxide, potatoes showed a nearly 14% decrease in protein, with barley showing a decrease of over 15%, and rice and wheat with reductions of nearly 10%. Soya beans had the lowest protein reduction at just 1.4%.

The reason for these changes is that as the carbon dioxide in the air increases, plants tend to accumulate more carbon in their tissues. Plants only have a limited amount of elements that they can hold and an increase in carbon means a decrease in other elements such as nitrogen, which is a key component of proteins.

This lack of nitrogen can partly be solved by adding nitrogen-based fertilizers to the soil however fertilizers have some environmental issues surrounding them and can cause damage to local water sources so this is not an ideal way to solve the problem. An alternative solution would be to breed strains of crop that, under higher carbon dioxide levels, will still contain ‘normal’ protein concentrations.

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