Technological Innovation for Soil Carbon Sequestration: A Conversation with Pluton Bio
Venture-Out Events - Building Bridges between Science and Entrepreneurship
Around one-third of the increase of atmospheric CO2 is attributed to soil organic carbon (SOC) loss: this not only is huge threat when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, but declining fertility due to SOC loss risks also great damage to agricultural productivity and thus food security. In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, climate change, and food systems shocks from the crisis in Ukraine, we need innovative solutions to problems like SOC loss, and we need them fast. Carbon sequestration presents an opportunity to reverse this SOC loss, by removing atmospheric CO2 and storing it in the soil carbon pool. Soil carbon sequestration technologies provide a crucial opportunity for negative emissions: scientific estimates indicate that agricultural soils have the potential to store an additional billion or more tons of carbon each year.
Nevertheless, challenges like scientific disagreement over the permanence of storage, fragility of smallholder land and thus credit rights, and inequity or difficulty of access to measurement technologies present obstacles for scientists and entrepreneurs alike. More collaboration between scientists and ventures can bridge the disconnect to solve these issues and strengthen soil carbon sequestration technologies – and opening up a dialogue is the impetus for these partnerships to grow.
On 07 July, join Pluton Biosciences founder and chief science officer Barry Goldman and climatologist/expert on soil carbon sequestration Ajit Govind from ICARDA / CGIAR for an interactive conversation about technological innovation for soil carbon sequestration.
Venture-Out Events are a series of interactive webinars in which innovative science-driven ventures present their successful scaling journey from lab to market, discuss avenues for collaboration, and nurture the entrepreneurial spirit within CGIAR’s scientists. Venture-Out Events are organized by the Accelerate for Impact Platform (A4IP): the venture space that builds on CGIAR’s legacy of Research and Innovation to support both incremental and transformational innovation to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges at the nexus of agriculture, environment, and health.