The soil microbial carbon pump for carbon sequestration

[Geoengineering News]

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-025-01861-4

Authors

Longkai Qiao, Junfei Wang, Shuangshuang Wei, Yilong Ren, Eric Lichtfouse & Jie Han 

32 Accesses

03 July 2025

Abstract

Will humans survive the climate crisis? The burning of fossil fuels and other carbon dioxide-emitting industrial and agricultural activities have sharply increased the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from about 280 ppmv in 1850 to 430 ppmv in April 2025 [1,2,3]. This has induced a +1.49 °C increase of the global surface temperature versus the 1850–1900 pre-industrial average temperature, with the ten most recent years being the warmest years on record [4, 5]. This change is remarkably represented using data from the United States National Aeronautics Space Administration (US NASA, Fig. 1). In April 2025, the threshold of a maximum 1.5 °C increase of the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit greenhouse emissions has thus nearly been reached [6], which means that we have just entered an era where catastrophic events will highly intensify [7]. In fact, +1.5 °C is already too high and is likely to raise sea-level by several meters, thus causing substantial damage to coastal populations [8]. This calls for techniques such as radiative forcing geoengineering [9] that could rapidly decrease atmospheric CO2 levels on the global scale. As a consequence, the number of academic reports on carbon capture and sequestration since 2015 has more than doubled compared to from 1992 to 2014 [10]. Here we discuss the global soil carbon pool, microbial carbon capture, the microbial carbon pump, contributions from plants, fungi and bacteria, and the use of synthetic microbial communities.

Source: Springer Nature Link