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Closing the gap between climate regulation and food security with nano iron oxides

Nature Sustainability (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Rice production poses one of the most important dilemmas between climate regulation and food security. While fertilization often results in a higher yield, it is also accompanied by more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. For this dilemma, the final consideration usually depends on the trade-offs to mitigate on-going climate change while supporting a continuously growing global population. Here we conducted a 4-year field experiment to evaluate the capacity of iron oxide nanoparticles (FeONPs) at 6.3 kg ha−1 yr−1 as the basal fertilizer to close the gap of such trade-offs. Compared with urea fertilization, FeONPs can mitigate climate change by reducing 50% of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions while supporting significant soil carbon sequestration by 7.4% in the fourth year. Moreover, through reductions in ammonia volatilization and the entrapment of nitrogen in nanoparticles, FeONPs improve the retention of soil nitrogen nutrients, leading to an increase in food production of up to 25%. Our results show that FeONPs effects became more and more prominent throughout a continuous 4-year application. Together, our study revealed FeONPs as a next-generation fertilizer with great potential to solve the dilemma of meeting food security demand while complying with climate regulation.

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Fig. 1: A conceptual framework showing that FeONPs fertilization can close the gap between climate regulation and food security trade-offs in rice ecosystems.
Fig. 2: FeONPs fertilization decreases GHG emissions by regulating the abundances of related microbial functional genes in the fourth year.
Fig. 3: FeONPs fertilization increases food production by retaining more N nutrient in paddy soils.

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The authors declare that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper and its Supplementary Information.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (no. 2021YFD1700803), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42177297, 41771295, 42277332) and CAS Strategic Priority Research Program (XDA28010302). M.D.-B. acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation for the I+D+i project PID2020-115813RA-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. M.D-B. was also supported by a project of the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) and the Consejería de Transformación Económica, Industria, Conocimiento y Universidades of the Junta de Andalucía (FEDER Andalucía 2014-2020 Objetivo temático “01 - Refuerzo de la investigación, el desarrollo tecnológico y la innovación”) associated with the research project P20_00879 (ANDABIOMA).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Engineering, Changzhou Vocational Institute of Industry Technology, Changzhou, China

    Yongjie Yu

  2. Key Laboratory of Agro-Environment in Downstream of Yangtze Plain, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Institute of Agricultural Resources and Environment, Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanjing, China

    Yongjie Yu, Yingliang Yu, Lihong Xue, Linzhang Yang & Shiying He

  3. College of Chemical Engineering, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, China

    Yongjie Yu, Youzhi Feng & Shiying He

  4. State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China

    Youzhi Feng

  5. Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center for Solid Organic Waste Resource Utilization, Nanjing, China

    Youzhi Feng

  6. The Pennsylvania State University at Mont Alto, Mont Alto, PA, USA

    Linghao Zhong

  7. Laboratorio de Biodiversidad y Funcionamiento Ecosistémico. Instituto de Recursos Naturales y Agrobiología de Sevilla (IRNAS), CSIC, Sevilla, Spain

    Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo

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  1. Yongjie Yu
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Contributions

Y.F., L.Y. and S.H. developed the original ideas. Yingliang Yu, L.X. and S.H. provided the original data. S.H., Yingliang Yu and L.X. contributed to lab analyses. Yongjie Yu, S.H., M.D.-B. and Y.F. conducted statistical analyses. Yongjie Yu, Y.F., L.Z., M.D.-B. and S.H. wrote the first draft of the manuscript, and all authors contributed substantially to revisions.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Youzhi Feng, Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo or Shiying He.

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Yu, Y., Feng, Y., Yu, Y. et al. Closing the gap between climate regulation and food security with nano iron oxides. Nat Sustain (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01334-6

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