The Surprising Solution to Climate Change: Fungi Cut 36% of Global Emissions

With increasing carbon emissions warming the planet, one of the main solutions to climate change is growing under our feet.

A study published Monday in the journal Current Biology found that fungi account for more than a third of the world’s annual fossil fuel emissions.

As such, fungi “represent a blind spot in modeling, conservation and carbon recovery,” said co-author Katie Field, Professor of Biology at the University of Sheffield, he said in a statement.

“The number we found was staggering,” Field added.

Field’s team found that mushrooms cut 36 percent of global fossil fuel emissions – enough to negate annual carbon pollution from China, the world’s largest carbon emitter. China outpaced its closest polluting competitor, the United States, by a factor of two.

Fungi are a broad biological kingdom that produce fungi – the fruiting bodies of much larger organisms that reproduce beneath the surface.

Although superficially resembling plants in that they move very slowly, fungi are more like animals, in that they share a need to find food and use chemicals to break it down—rather than synthesizing nutrients from sunlight and carbon dioxide.

Some fungi weave around the tips of plant roots, forming a symbiotic relationship that served as the ancient basis of life on Earth.

Roughly half a billion years ago, these “root fungi”—named after the co-Latin words for “mushroom” and “root”—provided plants with mineral nutrients such as phosphorus in place of factory-produced sugars.

Since these plants make this sugar from carbon dioxide from the air, it means that the fungus is actually a “carbon bank” growing underground.

Some are quite large: a type of giant mushroom that is famous on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula It covers an area of ​​37 acres, or 91 acres.

The study found that the world’s plants pump about 13 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide into underground fungi each year.

But just as importantly, this underground mushroom network is constantly being opened up by the many ways human society interacts with the subsurface world – through agriculture, mining and industry.

This intervention took a heavy toll. The United Nations warned last year that 90 percent of Earth’s topsoil – the thin, fertile skin on which the world’s plants and forests grow – is It could be in danger in 2050.

While the nutritional effects of the decline are clear, the climate effects are also severe, the team found.

The large amounts of carbon found in mushrooms are often “ignored” in favor of conservation efforts that seem more like protecting forests, said lead author Heidi Hawkins of the University of Cape Town.

Hawkins cautions that there are many details that are still unclear.

Like forests—which release carbon dioxide when trees die and store them as they grow—the picture of mushrooms as a one-way storehouse of carbon is too simplistic. Hawkins notes that we still don’t know how stable the carbon stored in mushrooms is.

“We know that these are fluxes, where some are stored in mycorrhizal structures while the fungi are alive, and even after they die,” he said.

Some of these carbon molecules can break down into a solid form into minerals in the soil. Some may attach to new plant bodies.

Others are lost back into the atmosphere—because, like animals, fungi release carbon dioxide as a waste product of respiration.

While the details of this relationship are still little understood, Field says, the outlines are clear.

“When we disrupt ancient life support systems in the soil, we are sabotaging our efforts to limit global warming and undermining the ecosystems we depend on,” he added.

While it’s not new news that these networks are important for biodiversity, “we now have more and more evidence that these networks are important for the health of our planet,” Field added.