Does the Amount of CO2 Improve or Somehow Affect the Development of Plants? by City Tech Blogger Eduardo Bravo

During the development of a plant, CO₂ is super important. By using sunlight and CO₂, plants produce sugars and oxygen by the process of photosynthesis. Many of the plants on Earth depend on this system to be alive. Many important political people have said that the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere does not cause any harm, and that in fact it helps plants to grow. There is some truth to this fact. According to the article “Does Rising CO2 Benefits Plants?” it says, “If you isolate a leaf [in a laboratory] and you increase the level of CO₂, photosynthesis will increase. That’s well established.” Thus, the amount of CO₂ benefits plants. But there is a misconception about this statement. Even though the increase of CO₂ improves the growth of a plant, there are other factors that also need to be taken into account in order to predict whether or not CO₂ is beneficial to plants. As is stated in the same article, “for example, nitrogen is often in short enough to supply that it’s the primary controller of how much biomass is produced….. If nitrogen is limited, the benefit of the CO₂ increase is limited… You can’t just look at CO₂, because the overall context really matters.”Many complexes play important roles in the development of a plant, and if a plant is overwhelmed with a high amount of CO₂ the plant can suffer harmful consequences. For example, when a plant is overwhelmed by the concentration of CO₂ its nutrients and growth get affected “plants get some benefits early on from higher CO₂, but that [benefit] starts to saturate… The more CO₂ you have, the less and less benefit you get.”

If the plants that we consume in our daily lives do not contain sufficient amount of nutrients we need for the production of energy, then, not only the CO₂ concentration affects plants but also humans because we begin to develop various diseases from the insufficient amount of carbs for our diet “[Food crops] lose significant amounts of iron and zinc – and grains [also] lose proteins…. A total of 1.4 billion women of child – bearing age and young children who live in countries with a high prevalence of anemia would lose more than 3.8 percent of their dietary iron at such CO₂ levels.”   As we know, if the high concentrations of CO₂ persist in the atmosphere, the high concentrations of CO₂ will cause an increase in the temperature of Earth, thus creating a more chaotic environment. A small increase in temperature due to the high concentrations of CO₂ (greenhouse gases) will rise the sea levels and will create more floods in cities close to the sea. For the people saying that an increase in CO₂ concentration on Earth usually helps the plants, these people forget that the most important part is that an increase on CO₂ concentrations induces climate change, therefore affecting Earth, and not being beneficial to either humans or plants.