Climate change is a persistent and growing challenge to plant life on our planet. Changes to the environment that plants are unaccustomed to affect how they grow, putting much at risk. Increasingly, plant scientists are trying to determine how these environmental changes will impact plant life and whether plants will be able to acclimate to a new status quo.  

Researchers from the Walker lab at the Michigan State University-U.S. Department of Energy Plant Research Laboratory, or PRL, are looking at how paper birch trees adapt t

In a new study,¹ led by the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics and published today (18 November) in Nature, an international group of authors who developed the science behind net zero demonstrate that relying on ‘natural carbon sinks’ like forests and oceans to offset ongoing CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel use will not actually stop global warming.

The science of net zero, developed over 15 years ago,² does not include these natural carbon sinks in the definition of net human-induced CO₂ emissions. Yet governments and corporations are increasingly turning to them to offset emissions, rather than reducing fossil fuel use or developing more permanent CO₂ disposal options. Emissions accounting rules encourage this by creating an apparent equivalence between fossil fuel emissions and drawdown of CO₂ by some natural carbon sinks, meaning a country could appear to have ‘achieved net zero’ whilst still contributing to ongoing warming.