In this Q&A, Carbon Brief looks at the difference between GMOs and gene-edited foods and whether these technologies can help crops deal with climate change while boosting food security.

Do genetically modified crops benefit climate mitigation and adaptation?

There have been a lot of claims – and counter-claims – about the climate benefits of GMOs, both in terms of making crops more resistant to extreme weather and in helping plants to absorb more carbon from the atmosphere.

Dr Emma Kovak is a senior food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute – a controversial thinktank in California that claims it “promotes technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges”.

Kovak was the lead author of a 2022 study which said that growing more GM crops, such as wheat, in the EU could lead to reduced land-use emissions in other parts of the world… The study claimed that this increase in EU GMOs would boost crop yields, which would allow the bloc to provide more of its own crops

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A 2011 review study found that GM crops could reduce the impacts of agriculture on biodiversity in a number of ways, such as by reducing insecticide use and boosting crop yields to ease the pressure to transform more land to grow crops.

A 2021 study found a correlation between GM crop growth and use of the herbicide glyphosate with an increase in soil carbon sequestration in a province of Canada. However, herbicide use decreased soil biodiversity in banana fields in Martinique, a Caribbean island, a different study found.

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